Sony Vaio PCG-C1 Hands On!
Author: Jack
Date: 1998/10/31
I received my Sony Vaio PCG-C1 from Dynamism a few days ago, and am *very* pleased both with their service and the product. Douglas at Dynamism answered all of my questions promptly, and helped me have it shipped by US Express Mail as where I live doesn't have home delivery (I live on Water Island, a tiny Island just South of Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands.
Screen: The screen is a crisp and clear active matrix LCD with a resolution of 1024x480 at 24 bit color depth. The controller is a NeoMagic 256AV which is nice and snappy. The brightness is a lot brighter than my old Fujitsu MonteCarlo which is also an active matrix display. At the lowest setting, the Sony is as bright as thme Fujitsu at it's highest. I like the aspect ratio. Once you start using it, you wish that your old desktop system looked the same. Wide is great for spreadsheets as well as having things with side by side frames.
Processor: The system uses a Pentium 233MHz MMX with the Intel 430TX chipset. It includes a 256K level II cache and 64MB of SDRAM (Expandable to 96MB by removing a 32MB secondary RAM module and replacing it with a 64MB one). Although not an "official" bench mark, I use the Persistence Of Vision ray tracer a lot. My old MonteCarlo (a Pentium 100MHz) computed about 980 pixels per second on the "Demo" data file. The Sony computes about 4,960 pixels per second. This is quite a jump up for me.
Operating System: Dynamism preload the US English version of Windows 98, and takes care of providing a keyboard mapping file to make using the keyboard (designed for Japanese use) easy. They also provide all of the special drivers used by the system for things like the camera modem USB iLink etc. The English instructions that they wrote made setup a breeze
Keyboard: The mapping is excellent, with the only minor hitch being that the tilde (~) character appears when pressing the up caret (^) key instead of at the shifted zero key position. Minor detail, and as soon as I work up a fix, I will pass it back to them. I am also working on remapping for DOS mode. This is easily taken care of, and it only affects a few special symbol keys which have their identities swapped around. I haven't had any problems, and I find myself touch typing the correct key combination anyway. Make a backup copy of the KBDUS.KBD file in the \WINDOWS\SYSTEMS directory. This is the Windows keyboard remap file that you replace the default on with.
Camera: What can I say? Having a built in camera is way cool! It captures both motion and still. I have been using the still capture mode so far. I downloaded ULTIMATE PAINT from http://www.megalux.co.hu which is a great paint program being developed for commerical use but still free at this time. It supports image imports. I select the Sony camera as the import device and tell it to acquire an image. A window courtesy of the Sony driver (prompts in English) shows a live video window that you can freeze and/or capture and return the image to Ultimate Paint for editing or special effects.
Sound: Works great! The tiny internal speaker is quite clear, and you can plug in an external set if you want. I use the headphone and microphone jacks with an Andrea AN series noise cancelling headset. It works great with the Microsoft Dictation speech recognition application from the MS Speech SDK 4.0.Misc.: The system includes a USB port which also supports the included floppy drive. Plug the floppy in AFTER Windows starts so the the hot swap USB drivers detect it and make it drive A:. I also uses a Logitech wheel type mouse which the system recognized without needing any special drivers. If you need to plug in more that one USB device at a time you can always get a hub, but the great thing about USB is its hot swap capability, so all you have to do is unplug whatever you aren't using and plug in something else. There is also an infrared port and a "firewire" iLink port. Sony includes an adapter for connecting an external monitor. The AC adapter is small and light weight.
Overall: This is a must have for people tired of lugging 20lbs of junk around every day just to have a portable PC. I just toss the Sony in my backpack, and off I go. I use a network card in the PCCARD slot at work to connect to the office network. Now that I've had "hands on" for a while, I know that I made the right choice. The vendor that I bought mine from can be found at: http://www.dynamism.com
Jack
I recently purchased the Vaio PCG-C1, and while it's definitely a worthwhile machine, it does have some definite flaws which anyone interested in the machine should consider.
First as to the machine itself, the size is great. Small enough to ride shotgun in a backpack. Definitely not pocket-sized, but light and quite portable. The keyboard is very good for something of this size, and the QWERTY layout is good, although the punctuation is all over the place, and keymapping vary even between Windows 98 and a DOS window in Windows 98.