Testing Grounds

During my Christmas trip to the US, I bought a new Sony VAIO. This is my second VAIO. The first was a fantastic little z505 that I used for almost ten years. It was a 386 with 256mb of RAM, so it way very much showing its age, but it was a fine machine to keep by the couch for e-mail and surfing.

The two machines are comparable in terms of size and design, but that’s about where the similarities end. This one runs Vista with a performance index of 4.7. It has a 3.2GHz dual core CPU, 3GB of RAM, and 320GB of HD space. It feels just as fast as the two killer desktops in my life. I can compress video and don’t even hear the cooling fan speed up. It has a real-world battery life of four or five hours, whereas the old one could do an hour even when it was brand-new, and for most of it’s life the battery life was literally about twenty seconds. Plus this one was half the price of the old one. Can’t argue with that.

The old VAIO was by far the most stable PC I’ve ever owned. Even after ten years it was more reliable and predicable than any desktop I’ve ever used. It’s too soon to say if this one will be just as stable, but so far so good.

I don’t know if I’ll still be using this one ten years from now, but I’m certainly going to try.

Tags: hardware //