Amusing review of the Sony VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC
While we all know (and hopefully agree) that the new Sony VAIO P-Series Lifestyle PC is a work of art, what we really don’t know is how the device performs.
Of course, a quick look at the specs and one could easily surmise this system would be an under-performer – even when compared to standard netbooks available today. Just look at the ingredients of the VAIO P Lifestyle PC – an Atom Z520 processor clocked at 1.33 GHz; a 60GB HDD with a rotational speed of 4200 RPM, Intel integrated graphics powering a 1600 x 768 display, and finally, Windows Vista as the operating system. Yes… all ingredients for a possibly underwhelming system.
Luckily, the folks at Akihabara News managed to get their hands on a new Lifestyle PC, and as a result, have confirmed what we’ve suspected. Quoting the article now – the “the Vaio P sucks… BIG TIME ! And at least with the stock version…”
Ouch!
I’m not kidding – that’s what they said. While they didn’t actually run any formal benchmarks on the system, they arrived to this conclusion simply by using the system.
Their main observation? It takes a long time to boot. The desktop comes up in about 1.02 minutes but it’s far from usable. It takes a minute or so more before the system is actually usable. Of course what we don’t know is how much crapware might be installed on the Lifestyle PC. Sony is notorious for installing loads of crapware.
Now to be fair, Akihabara News does get a few things wrong in their posting.
First off, the most glaring error occurs when the author claims the VAIO P has a dual core CPU. The Atom processor in the VAIO P is in fact a single core processor with hyper-threading enabled which means you get two “logical processors” – not two physical processors. Hyper-threaded enabled processors can perform anywhere between 15 to 30% faster than non-HT enabled processors – but it’s very dependent on your use case scenarios.
Secondly, the reviewer states “ATOM CPUs just sucks big time unless they are properly integrated like on the Ion platform (NVidia)”. Actually the Atom processor performs quite nicely given the energy efficiency of the platform. However this particular system couples a 1.33GHz Atom with the wrong OS – Windows Vista. Vista is a resource hog – plain and simple. If one must run Vista on the Atom, then replace the integrated graphics with a real GPU – say the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M from the Ion platform.
Now back to the main issue at hand – the Lifestyle PC’s performance. Yes, it does bite the big one under Windows Vista.. but was it really any surprise? Our first hand use of the VAIO P at CES 2009 convinced us that we were looking at a performance handicapped system. There were response time delays when you clicked on menus, started up applications, or ran video clips. Even that video clip we attempted to launch was choppy at best on the Lifestyle PC (I wish I took a video clip of that).
Of course, things might look slightly different if you couple the VAIO P with a solid state drive – boot times and application launch times might be faster – but so will be the asking price of the system.
Ahh.. the VAIO P Lifestyle PC – it’s downright young and sexy on the outside but slow and geriatric on the inside.
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