High Price and Low Performance: The Sony VAIO VGN-P530H
With the Sony VAIO VGN-P530H (the "Sony P"), Sony continues its long and oddly proud tradition of making overpriced, underpowered, completely useless netbooks. The netbook audience has always been a tiny niche market, mainly targeting people for whom a laptop is too big and a PDA is too small. Given the Sony P's poor design and limited functionality, it measures up poorly against its competitors (especially since it is more expensive) and is destined to end its shelf life in the bargain bin.
The first look we get at the system specifications tells us where the biggest programs are. It operates on two GB of RAM, which are not upgradeable, sixty GB of hard drive space, and 1.33 Gh of processing power. It also runs Windows Vista, an operating system known for its resource consumption. Operating this OS on this computer will have disastrous results. This is the first of the design problems, and there are lots more.
We should remember to mention the strong points of this computer before tearing into it. The Sony P is portable and convenient, less than ten inches long, five wide, and only one thick. That's pretty small, but it remains comfortable for typing, and weighs just one and a half pounds. It might not be quite as small as the commercials imply (we can't fit one in our hip pockets), it does fit well in a briefcase, purse or satchel, and the looks are nice. However, under that shiny skin is a host of problems.
The single biggest complaint customers have with the Sony P is that it is simply not powerful enough to run Windows Vista. Microsoft's minimum system requirements for running Windows Vista is a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM-although if you want Vista to run any faster than a turtle with arthritis, you need at least 2 GB of RAM. In other words, the Sony P has barely enough power to simply run its operating system. If you try to run any other program on top of that (such as word processing), it system slows down incredibly.
The obvious solution would simply be to uninstall Vista and install Windows XP or Windows 7 instead. Unfortunately, this is difficult, if not impossible. To begin with, the Sony P has no CD-ROM drive, making installing XP tricky at best. Worse, the Sony P uses a new video card (the Intel GMA 500 chipset) for which there is no Windows XP driver available. One can try installing Windows 7 instead, for which there is a GMA 500 video card driver available.
Unfortunately, the next problem is that much of the Sony P's features, such as its wireless internet software, which can use Ethernet, wireless 802.11b/g/n, and Verizon's 3G Mobile Broadband (for an extra $45 per month), requires special Sony software. Unfortunately, much of this specialized software only runs on Windows Vista. In other words, if you switch to Windows 7 or XP, you lose much of the Sony P's functionality. Even if you keep Vista, the operating system and all the Sony bloatware takes up 20 GB of the already small 60 GB hard drive.
Another problem with the Sony P's video card is that it has no dedicated memory for video. Instead, up to 760 MB of system memory is allocated to the video card. Unfortunately, as we already mentioned, the Sony P already needs all of its available memory to run the operating system at a decent speed. The result is that many users of the Sony P report frustrating skipping, slow-downs, and flickers when trying to watch DVDs-and watching streaming video, such as YouTube, is all but impossible.
The Sony P just isn't meant to be a primary computer. As a secondary one, portability has been made most important, making this the appropriate netbook for someone who wants a computer to do extremely simple jobs. Inventory or notetaking are going to be this computer's best tasks. If you want to purchase a netbook for any other purpose, you're best advised to look elsewhere for more power and lower cost.
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