The most surprising benefit of getting an OLED TV was how much better the experience of watching 4:3 content was. The true black of the sides really helped remove attention from them. Watching at night in the dark, it may as well be a 4:3 screen.
I still have my C1XS Picturebook. It's a fantastic machine. 400mhz PII, 64mb ram, upgraded to a 40gb hard drive. It has a firewire port and i used it to edit broadcast video for my job at a news station. No one in my high school was ready for me to pull a "laptop" out of my Echo jeans pocket! Let alone then edit video on it... They actually have regular laptop "thin" hard drives. Mine will boot from USB floppy, and from PCMCIA CDROM, but couldn't get it to boot from USB to IDE adapter with a CD drive. So i ended up dumping the install files for 98SE to the hard drive on a second partition, boot floopy, cd d:, setup. Never had a 98SE install go that fast! Camera was terrible in mine, too. They were competitive at the time with low cost webcams, i would say. The fact that it was built in was the hotness.
that's an absolutely wonderful anecdote. Even with my experience editing video, even on these machines, and even to an extent *at the time*, I would not have expected it to work as well as it did here, so I can believe that it was totally doable in a pinch now. What a wild time to be alive, working in a field like that, and that particular level of nerdy (if you don't mind my saying :p)
@@CathodeRayDudeOh i was definitely nerdy. I was "that guy". Getting pulled out of classes to fix teacher's computers since 6th grade - the Apple II days, and left over Tandy RLX1000s - which i still have two of!
@@CathodeRayDudeMy machine was the Pentium II, but it ran DivX and AVI files just fine, despite being only a 400mhz, with 64mb ram! The Transmeta chips were hot garbage! Their power consumption was impressive tho.
@@CathodeRayDude that camera actually looked better than some of the fake stuff that advertised higher resolutions and shipped with 8mb cam instead of the 2million mb pixels or whatever it is they advertised lol
39:18 What makes this more amazing is that you're not running OG Golden Axe from 1989, running on the Sega System 16B (the board that the Genesis was based off of), you were playing the arcade-exclusive sequel, Revenge of Death Adder, which ran off of the much more intense System 32 hardware. Even with the graphical glitches and imperfections, being able to run that at full speed on MAME on a 20 year old PC is honestly nothing short of amazing, especially on the Transmeta Crusoe.
To clarify, most of those glitches are down to it being an older version of MAME. The System 32's scaling and transformation effects were a bit janky until a couple of years ago, I remember getting a big nostalgia hit when the (actually mediocre) Spider Man game was free of obvious glitching.
Sony was a market leader in this stuff all throughout the 90's until Jony Ive got his hands on the computer design industry. The industrial designers at Sony had a way of making devices like these have a presence while keeping the looks almost the exact same no matter what the design of the device was. That takes some serious effort. Props, Sony.
On one hand, it's very sad to see Sony leaving the PC market. Even the last Vaios were still unique and interesting, the only ones that seem to follow on the novel concepts they used to do is the ROG laptops. On the other hand, all of their computers were always driver hell so good riddance.
@@Fay7666 Steve Jobs actually went to Sony with MacOSX on a Viao (quite a well known story) which Sony turned down saying they've already perfected Windows on the viaos. They simply just couldn't be bothered to rewrite drivers for Unix in my opinion.
How is OSX not lighter than windows? Windows still supports 16 bit, 32 bit and 64 bit and uses an ancient filesystem. Even HFS that Apple was using at the time was quicker than MSDOSFat. @@richardhunter9779
@@richardhunter9779 early OSX was absolutely heavier than WinXP, but 10.4 and 10.5 were much lighter than Vista. It made sense as a decision early-on, but by the middle of the decade was perhaps a bit more dubious.
I'm immersed in nostalgia. Back when I was in junior high, I stumbled upon a C1R at a second-hand hardware shop, fell in love at first sight, and cherished it dearly. Its portability, being able to take it anywhere, was incredibly handy and I have fond memories of that. I haven't thrown it away yet, so it's probably still lying somewhere in the warehouse.
oh my god the ants. I have like 4 traps set up and they still get into shot sometimes. it's just a "western washington at this time of year" thing, exterminators say there's nothing we can do to keep them out, but man, it's frustrating. I did my best to keep them out of the video but I knew I'd miss one.
@@CathodeRayDudeI tried the advion ant gel this year and it greatly reduced the number of ants crawling around. I believe it's what exterminators use instead of traps. Raid max liquid traps worked last year, but didn't help this time.
Couple of notes on VAIOisms... First, I think (it's been a while) that blinking battery indicator was normal. IIRC, it double-blinks when it's charging, stops blinking when it gets close to full, and stays lit solid when you're running from battery. It'll start slowly blinking (50/50 duty cycle) again when the battery gets low. Something like that. Firewire CD-ROMs were definitely a Sony thing. I have an R505, which was a Pentium III laptop that had a removable "media dock." That means it's a really thin laptop if you don't need floppy and CD drives, but it levers onto a second bottom-half that includes those drives, and replicated ports on the back. The optical drive (combo DVD-ROM / CD-RW drive) is actually connected via Firewire. There's no cable or anything, it's just part of the bespoke dock connector on the bottom, but that's the protocol it uses. This is noteworthy because it has consequences: I'm not sure how you would support it in DOS (by this point, I don't think it mattered much -- you could choose Windows 2000 Pro, but mine shipped with the new version of Windows called XP.) And if you didn't have the dock, you were in a world of hurt. USB boot wasn't supported. Just internal IDE, Firewire, and floppy.
The key to removing gross decomposing rubber and adhesive is to use WD40 first, then you can use isoprop or regular detergent to remove the WD40 residue. This case didn't seem too bad, but there's lots of adhesives that won't lift off with just a solvent. WD40 first solves that problem in one step. Remember this for those terrible stickers that leave a residue behind, WD40 is your friend.
The worst day of my life was when I decided that, what with WD-40 being my friend and all, it would obviously be great for cleaning mechanical keyboards.
@@therealchriscunningham if you felt like disassembling the switches and cleaning them, you might get the clicks back 😅 depending on whether the sharp click geometry just got too-lubricated, or whether you melted something.
I would've thought it was cool, and honestly, compared to my desktop PC of the time it probably was faster, but man it would've been so expensive and kinda useless within 3 or so years.
I tested some Transmeta machines ages ago, and my main conclusion was that the Crusoe was a _weird_ chip. The code morphing it did was extremely workload-sensitive: the machine might be struggling with one task, and you'd try another expecting to get similar results, and while you usually would, it was far from unknown for the machine to sail through it at several times the speed you'd expect given the earlier outcome. I don't remember if they were able to get those speedups more consistently with updates, but it may be fun to look into. Fun video--thanks!
I have a Transmeta Crusoe based thin client I use for retro gaming, its fantastic once you know its limitations, its a shame it didnt get more future versions that cover newer instruction sets
I find these videos weirdly comforting. I have never had any friends into any sort of pc gaming or repair. Seering someone have 5he same insticts about making a pc work and using it is strangley good. I dont know if i can explain it.
as nice as the wide monitors like this are, displays with a vertical resolution lower than 768 pixels have so many issues with programs. In fact, that's why that oddball 1366x768 resolution was created- as a compatibility resolution for widescreen displays! So many legacy applications just outright crash if they can't do at least 1024x768. So while the 1280x600 screen looks fantastic, there are so many limitations to that kind of thing and that probably limited their longterm viability (well, that and panel availability in general. Can't imagine there being many manufacturers of ultrawide 600p panels)
The interface on that camera software makes me think of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer wins some boudoir photography and the first thing the photog does is turn off the lights and slather the lens with vaseline ;)
You know what, I keep forgetting that phones often technically have ultra wide displays, and I need to keep that in mind when I eventually do my video on this subject. Thank you!
@@CathodeRayDude "technically" is pretty fair when you're talking about cinematic things. I know that a couple of directors etc complain that viewing things on a phone is not fair to things designed to be watched in a theatre.
@@CathodeRayDudeSony Xperia 1 III technically has a '4K' display at 21:9 ratio for pocketability, watching movies, shooting video, and using it as a external camera monitor. Though, the UI renders at 1080p and the only way you can get 4K is to push directly to the GPU's framebuffer. They basically cut off the edges of the 4K resolution.
I had one of those Sony USB floppy drives in my data center “rescue” kit along with a couple of boot floppies, usb serial adapter, a null modem adapter, a cat5 and an rj11 cable along with other miscellaneous crap for whatever server rescuing needed to be done.
I had one of those (C1VP) back in high school in 2001. It was so cool to have a laptop that small. I kept it in my backpack and took it everywhere. It came with ME, but upgraded it to XP once it came out. It was painful getting the drivers for the jogdial, hotkeys and camera to work, but after playing with different versions from different models, I finally figured out a set that worked. Used a CD travel case as a bag for it.
I love these little guys, as borderline useless as most of them might be these days. I used to use a very small Dell with a ten-inch, ultra wide screen with a 3rd generation i3 CPU and 6GB of RAM permanently affixed to the motherboard so you couldn't increase the amount without going through a great deal of trouble. I did get rid of the 750GM mechanical hard drive and swapped it for a Samsung EVO SATA solid state drive with 2TB of space on it. It's my mini media player. I use it to watch videos and listen to music, and when I need a 4th screen for doing school assignments it's great for displaying a webpage of two. It's definitely a little clunky and I've spent a little time, money, and effort just to get it useable and keep it that way, but I get way more use out of it than I thought I would when my mom asked me if I wanted it before she took it to the e-waste center.
Dude I looked for a good history video about the Crusoe from like Asianometry or something, but there is NOTHING. You could do the Internet a real solid with one.
I'm really annoyed that the new mini machines aren't like these. These had no gimmick (except maybe the jog dial and their silly memory cards), and were just good laptops.
I've had luck doing the following to replace feet in these types of cases: 1) Buy a tube of silicone gasket maker from Harbor Freight. The black kind. 2) Spoot some out on a piece of waxed paper. 3) Put another piece of waxed paper on top of it. 4) Use a credit card to flatten it out to the right thickness for your needs. 5) Wait a day for it to dry. 6) Peel the waxed paper off to retrieve your silicone sheet. 7) Use X-Acto knife to cut out the shaped feet that you need. 8) Get some of that double sided tape meant to keep cats from scratching up your furniture, and use that to stick it to your footless device in the foot holes.
I had the Pentium one and then the first Crusoe one with a brand new battery and cardslot wifi card (and cardslot CD ROM) - loved them, was the perfect machine to run a Primera disc printer at work in a cramped space cos it was so small it could sit on top of the damn printer. The hinges are the weak point, and the old one which used a small proprietary fragile rectangular DC jack. Worked fine with Windows 2000, the LCD was really good for the time too
“NATURALLY….” *Muscle memory action off camera and a pause* Back into frame with a FireWire beast😂😂 Thank you for making these, they’re much more therapeutic than you know.
I had what was I think the lowest end colour PDA that Sony offered at the time, a Clie SJ-22 and even at that end of the market it was a great device. Rugged, excellent design and usability for a sub-$200 price. The jog wheel was a great addition to PalmOS. I got it in Fall 2003 and carried it everywhere with me daily right up until I got my first smartphone in 2010.
I miss my PictureBook C1X - the original model that was available in the US with its Pentium MMX 266 MHz and 64 MB RAM. The various models were significantly different.
Goo-Gone is the best when you're dealing with _adhesives_ because it will dissolve them. With IPA, you might end up lifting it off the case, but it'll just ball up whatever the old label's media was (paper, e.g.), and leave sticky residue behind. OTOH, stuff like this, IPA is very effective. Except, yes, it'll remove ink -- whether you intended that or not. If you've got a sticky mess on a label, you're just going to have to choose whether you want it clean, or intact. I also use Krud Kutter, which works GREAT for removing general environmental nastiness from plastic and metal. It doesn't tend to damage anything you care about. It's just a cleaner. My 2c.
Thanks for the input, I appreciate it! I've heard of Krud Kutter a couple times, I'll check it out. And I wonder if the goo gone might do better with some really unfortunate soft-touch I'm dealing with on another machine...
For screens, I find that Windex tends to streak more than Sprayway Glass Cleaner, that I think came from Costco. That stuff is magic. It also really helps with picking up dust and cat hair, that tends to just wad up and stick on the edges of where you wipe with a plain damp (paper) towel.
i'm really surprised how few comments i've gotten about the fan noise, I thought it would put a lot of people off but nobody seems to mind. glad you enjoyed!
Always use blue window cleaner (refuse to call it Windex, because over here the prominent brand is Glassex) and a sheet of the cheapest noname kitchen roll. It has never flithied up or damaged any screen I cleaned with it, which is a lot. Be it glossy or matte, touch or nontouch, glass or plastic, LCD or CRT, it always cleans absolutely perfectly fine. Blue cleaner doesn't dissolve any protective layer, as it isn't alcohol based. I think it's more of an ammonia-based mixture actually, and ammonia is surprisingly mild.
@@robertbackhaus8911 If that's true, it probably still counts as "mild". And it seems fine if you clean a screen no more than a few times per year. Just don't sneeze into your screen all the time, I suppose.
Nice video. As for me, I’ll take pillar boxing all day over bars on the top and bottom. Full height looks better than having dead space above and below. And no stretching the image, ever.
there's nothing that annoys me more than the fact that early oughts laptops hold a charge basically forever, but my laptop from just a few years ago can't hold a charge for more than a day.
I love these "let's mess around with some neat electronics" videos. It is very relatable and interesting to listen to. I hope that you enjoy creating this kind of content.
In its defence, the P3 celerons where an extremely good deal at that time. Especially shortly after with the Tualatins, I skipped the entire P4 era rocking one of those.
I bought a P4m laptop and liked it so much that I went with a P4 desktop. Prescott to be precise. I almost swore off of Intel after that. I had no idea that P4m and Netburst were so completely different.
The Transmeta Crusoe was actually a special RISC processor that had special low level software running on it dubbed "code morphing software" that dynamically recompiled x86 instructions into it's native RISC ones, by taking shortcuts, combining multiple operations into one, and learning which instructions frequently get used and adapting to execute those faster. It will literally learn as it executes code to run that code faster the next time. It was actually really cool. Intel actually ripped off the design for their Atom line of processors, and got caught and sued by Transmeta, and I spoke to the engineer that discovered this theft. Transmeta ended up licensing it to Intel and this is now in the underpinnings of all Intel Core CPUs from the mid 2000s onward. Do you remember how the whole x86 industry hit a wall in the mid 2000s? Well it was Transmeta's technology that is to thank for modern Intel CPUs, which are all now actually RISC chips with translation layers over-top emulating the older CISC Intel x86 instruction set.
The idea that x86 in the mid-2000s and was saved by Transmeta's technology is hard to believe. Intel was running into a wall with the P4 design, and even IBM was struggling with a lack of generational gains in the Power architecture, instead pushing up clock speed at the cost of heat. AMD were doing well though, and they carried the momentum from the Athlon 64 (introducing the AMD64 instruction set) into multicore CPUs with the X2. What actually happened was that CPU manufacturers realised that clock speed gains were no longer a given and instead they needed to focus on efficiency gains and concurrency. This change wasn't all that unexpected, multi-cpu systems already existed in server and workstation hardware, and Intel had introduced Hyperthreading in the early 2000s. Parallel was just where things were heading already.
Intel Atom wasn't announced until March 2008 and came out in June that year. Even 45nm Wolfdale Core2 Duo's like the E8400 and E8500 were already available in January 2008 and Yorkfield Core2 Quad's like the Q9550 came out in March 2008 (or November 2007 for Yorkfield XE C2Q QX9650). Intel's first internally RISC-like x86 CPU was the Pentium Pro in 1995 and most Intel CPUs have been like that ever since.
Modern x86 CPUs are barely anything like the Transmeta chips. A lot of the stuff such as decoding and optimization that is done in software on the Crusoe is done in hardware, and Intel was already doing this prior to the release of the Transmeta chips (since the Pentium Pro). There's no underlying VLIW core to be found, they produce micro-ops. In some sense, you could call that an "underlying VLIW core", but in principle you could write software that runs directly on the Crusoe (which is, in essence, what CMS is). You can't really write software in microcode on modern CPUs. More than anything else, modern x86 CPUs (and even modern high-performance ARM!) look more like a cleaned up and optimized hybrid of the Pentium M/Athlon 64 and Pentium 4. Moreover, the Transmeta patents in question aren't specific to their architecture at all. Some of them are even about out-of-order hardware execution of instructions, which I believe their CPUs don't use.
Minor mistake, the efficieon DID have a sort of speculative register file thing. It still was an in-order CPU to which out-of-order scheduling hardware patents would not apply.
I have a very similar laptop with a Crusoe 5800, a Fujitsu Lifebook P2110. I really liked it at the time. It was running NetBSD an was able to watch AVIs and DVD. The screen was very similar to this Sony. Great video!
Another option for slightly less solvent-y cleaners is good old wd-40. I'm sure it has weird interactions with some stuff but I've found it to be between isopropyl and windex in aggressiveness. It also nicely inactivates adhesive.
It's not so much that the Firewire port didn't have the power to run an optical drive from the bus, it's more that the connector Sony used for IEEE 1394/Firewire is only the 4 pin variety which AFAIK is signalling only, there's no significant power delivery present. Hence the weird secondary DC out port.
Whenever I hear that song I can still hear Jack Horkheimer saying, "Keep looking up!" on PBS' Star Hustler TV program coupled with cheesy computer animations. I loved that show.
The Picturebook C1xn I had included a 266MHz processor, a 4Gb hard drive, a 5Gb PCMCIA hard drive, swapped with the modem and Ethernet card and had a 1024x480 screen. The screen was bright, sharp and looked far better than the limited resolution suggested. I used it to code on my train journey in the morning and evening working. I had an iLink DVD drive but the cables and lack of a deck on the train meant it was impossible to watch a movie. The web camera rotated from front facing to rear facing and I used it as my first "digital camera". On the side it had a little wheel that ran through various set up options and volume control. It is still working, in a museum now where as later Vaio laptops have died.
The Transmeta Crusoe is actually a very interesting CPU. Ars Technica has a pretty good article from the year 2000 that explains some of how it works so differently from your garden variety x86 CPU.
The PictureBook was the first laptop to have a webcam installed as standard. On the IBM PC110 PalmTop, Canon had produced a specific PCMCIA card webcam (eventually for other laptops top) for it that may predate the Vaio. And yes the ThinkPad 850 or 860 may have a webcam before the vaio, but not standard, it was an expensive upgrade.
pillar boxing, imho, is less of a problem with something like oled, where the black pixels in the pillars are just off, and not giant grey blocks to the side. in a dark room watching a movie/show, it's difficult to notice unless you're picking nits
I owned the VERY FIRST NEC Ultralite with the 2mb silicon hard disk. It was the first, and for a short time, the only true notebook computer. I absolutely loved it lithium-metal exploding battery and all. This machine reminded me of that. Ahead of its time.
I remember seeing these tiny laptops in the shop as a kid and thinking they were so cool and always wanting one! Unfortunately the industry didnt keep this small form factor, palm tops died off, Nokia communicators came and went, netbooks came and went then somewhere along the line we switched to having android tablets. Id still love to have a modern Vaio C1. Im just in love with that tiny form factor. Although my android tablet with a keyboard could probably do the job just fine but I just love playing around with gadgets. Id use it like a netbook or chromebook. youtube/netflix, browsing the net, emails and maybe some retro gaming. I might actually look at picking up a GPD pocket 3 because of this video haha
D-Limonene, the active ingredient in Goo-gone and Goof-off, amongst other adhesive and residue removers, is extremely effective but can also melt certain types of plastics. It's also exceptionally good at ripping the dye out of things like printed labels, so I don't recommend using it on those kinds of things. But if you do happen to have a problem of labels and adhesive on things it doesn't dissolve, then limonene is a fantastic solution for them. It also dissolves chewing gum, butyl rubber, some types of resin, and a variety of other compounds. Great stuff to have around. Just remember to store it well because the vapor pressure of limonene isn't particularly high, so it's quite volatile and will happily evaporate away from a poorly sealed container in the same way that mineral spirits will disappear on you. On a side note, you can actually make a putty-like plastic filler out of limonene in a similar way to acetone by just dissolving a bunch of styrene into it until it forms a very viscous and sculptable goo. Pack it into whatever needs filling with a putty knife and then wait for the limonene to evaporate.
Damn it, now I've got the "let's ask the internet" jingle stuck in my head. I'm humming it, I'm whistling it, I will probably eventually try to play it on my saxophone
2:45 fun fact the now standard 16:9 ratio was first proposed by SMPTE in 1984 specifically because it was the geometric mean between Cinema ratio and 4:3, a "mathematically ideal" compromise between the two
Had a slightly bigger Crusoe powered Fujitsu laptop back in the day (11.6" rings a bell, that might have been the laptop that replaced it). Was replacement for a Toshiba Libretto so I was quite used to slow. Was my main laptop for about 3 years. Think Centrino killed them off. Really good for power consumption. I travelled a lot. Ran MAME great.
ISTR the Crusoe supposedly could "learn" from running programs how to optimize its working, so the first run would be atrocious, but would improve with iterations. If I remember well, they had for a time a rather famous engineer you might have heard of, named Linus Thorvald who once built a little i80386 OS, nothing professional.
For cleaning, white gas/lighter fluid. Smaller containers from Zippo or similar, or by the gallon from Coleman, as examples. Good for taking label adhesives off, not likely to damage printing and paints.
Long story short. that P series on the left. I was an authorized SONY VAIO dealer in my small IT shop for 4 years. I sold a couple P series to some very well dressed business men who wanted the ultralight travel experience. I played around with it in the shop it was a bad experience like every "netbook" was.
Thank you for the anecdote because this is exactly what I figured, that those things existed in order to be sold as jewelry to people with more money than sense, hahaha.
One of the absolute best laptops I ever owned was a VAIO. It was a first gen i7 and it managed to stay cool even when compiling for hours on all threads. Totally blew me away that was even possible at the time.
I have a transmeta c1 picturebook, i love using it to run vintage games because what a ridiculous thing to play games on. As a teen I LUSTED after the picturebook, tiny computing has been a dream of mine since i was young and gpd finally made it happen
I’ve been using my Vaio for a few projects recently. It’s not as cool as this (just a generic thing from the BX line) but even that makes me go “dang, Sony made cool computers”. Fingerprint reader? Yes. Cool memorystick reader? Yes. Dock? YES! Nice metal chassis? Yes. All round a classy machine.
Remove manufactured by Smith and Nephew is a medical grade adhesive remover that is used to remove bandage adhesive from humans. It is by far the best adhesive remover I've used in my professional life and it's gentle enough for most plastics
One of my dad's work laptops had exactly the same issue with the nub: any input would result in it slowly creeping to the top-left. I think it went away with exercise like it did here, but I don't remember for certain. It was a mid-90s IBM ThinkPad. I wish I still had his old work computers. His first laptop had an absolutely appalling purple monochromatic display with horrendous ghosting - the kind of thing that renders mouse trails kind of a necessity - but I still played games on it (mainly Lemmings from what I recall). It was computer beige and I believe it was a Compaq. The second was a "luggable" - a big heavy box with a keyboard that clipped off the side to reveal its full colour screen. The keyboard cable was coiled like telephone handset cord and at it was a massive step up in power. I used to play Doom on it, including multiplayer with my cousin. I don't recall the brand, but it was dark grey and I think it has a fairly impressive array of ports on the side. Then it was the ThinkPad. Or maybe there was a sequence of a few? Hard to say since they look pretty similar. It was long before they added the trackpad, but it did have a CD drive, which was exciting, and the rubber on the nub gradually wore away until the post stuck through. It had some sort og rapid application development platform on it (Borland Delphi I think); poking around the example projects in that was how I learnt about powers of two and using bitmasks to efficiently store flags (they weren't presented in binary, so I had a delightful moment of discovery when I realized how the powers slotted in around each other without interfering with one another). I'm not really going anywhere with this. Just reminiscing.
A friend had a small vauo like that one it got tossed out of the window on the first floor (while in the laptop bag) and walked overby 20 firemen during a fire and we found it back next day and it still worked 😊😊 still amazed by it after 24 years
Amazingly, I have had really good luck with hand sanitizers! The alcohol content works just like it did in this video, but (maybe only some and not all) plain unscented hand sanitizers have glycerol which in this context acts as a mild soap.
3:20 It's of course subjective, but pillarboxing is perfectly fine by me IF the backlight of the screen isn't turning it light grey. If it's black or near black (like with OLED), it's fine. Or the "Ambient Mode" that TH-cam does nowadays (or that we did ourselves with e.g. Philips hue lamps and their HDMI box) which makes the borders colored in a way that works with the scene. But yeah, Pillarboxing on some mid-2000's TN display is distracting :)
loving this laptop, had one in my uni days, mine was c1vj I think, its from the time when sony was coool. mw was the one that I wanted but it was too expensive
Never had a Sony Vaio laptop, netbook or otherwise but I've always liked the blue-ish purple-ish color scheme and the fact that Sony always did things just a little different than other computer manufacturers.
I had a similar one (Sony Vaio TR2MP) around 2004. I bought it used at a computer market in London. It was surprisingly good. The camera, for the time, was great (you have to remember that webcams were still not that common and mostly rotten potato quality). It was great to watch movies on long flights. IFEs back then still had tiny, low-quality screens, and limited content selection. The battery was enough to be practical during an overnight 16h flight (probably 4hs+ of video playback, can't remember exactly). I sold it after the Windows XP SP2 came out, as it became so slow that it was almost unusable. I sold it for the same price I had bought it (try to do that with any laptop that's not an Apple. Vaios were good).
![[🔴LIVE] งานประกาศรางวัล MAYA TV AWARDS 2024 : มายามหาชน](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nwmWYXXVwBY/mqdefault.jpg)
Yay! The "Let's Ask the Internet" jingle wasn't a one-off joke! I love this level of inter-episode consistency!
I love it! Though he didn't say the laptop was the perfect size 😭
The most surprising benefit of getting an OLED TV was how much better the experience of watching 4:3 content was. The true black of the sides really helped remove attention from them. Watching at night in the dark, it may as well be a 4:3 screen.
Part of the reason why I love watching stuff on an OLED phone.
LCD have come a long way, but they still don't match OLED for dark room viewing. I would never go back to one at this point.
Loving the new Let's Ask the Internet jingle. Serious homestar runner vibes
"How do you type with boxing gloves on?"
And that's the end of this segment. Note that it's 'Let's ask the Internet' NOT 'Let's answer the Internet'.
@@Toonrick12 ?
@@PoosaycvmImagine the comment being voiced by Strong Bad, it'll make more sense
He should Have poured some Mountain Dew on it
And the "Let's Not Ask the Internet" jingle in one of the previous videos, that is just "Let's Ask the Internet" backwards.
I still have my C1XS Picturebook. It's a fantastic machine. 400mhz PII, 64mb ram, upgraded to a 40gb hard drive. It has a firewire port and i used it to edit broadcast video for my job at a news station. No one in my high school was ready for me to pull a "laptop" out of my Echo jeans pocket! Let alone then edit video on it...
They actually have regular laptop "thin" hard drives. Mine will boot from USB floppy, and from PCMCIA CDROM, but couldn't get it to boot from USB to IDE adapter with a CD drive. So i ended up dumping the install files for 98SE to the hard drive on a second partition, boot floopy, cd d:, setup. Never had a 98SE install go that fast!
Camera was terrible in mine, too. They were competitive at the time with low cost webcams, i would say. The fact that it was built in was the hotness.
that's an absolutely wonderful anecdote. Even with my experience editing video, even on these machines, and even to an extent *at the time*, I would not have expected it to work as well as it did here, so I can believe that it was totally doable in a pinch now. What a wild time to be alive, working in a field like that, and that particular level of nerdy (if you don't mind my saying :p)
@@CathodeRayDudeOh i was definitely nerdy. I was "that guy". Getting pulled out of classes to fix teacher's computers since 6th grade - the Apple II days, and left over Tandy RLX1000s - which i still have two of!
@@alexcrouse hahaha, literally the same thing, I was being called into other classrooms to fix computers! apple iis sometimes, even!
@@CathodeRayDudeMy machine was the Pentium II, but it ran DivX and AVI files just fine, despite being only a 400mhz, with 64mb ram! The Transmeta chips were hot garbage! Their power consumption was impressive tho.
@@CathodeRayDude that camera actually looked better than some of the fake stuff that advertised higher resolutions and shipped with 8mb cam instead of the 2million mb pixels or whatever it is they advertised lol
39:18 What makes this more amazing is that you're not running OG Golden Axe from 1989, running on the Sega System 16B (the board that the Genesis was based off of), you were playing the arcade-exclusive sequel, Revenge of Death Adder, which ran off of the much more intense System 32 hardware. Even with the graphical glitches and imperfections, being able to run that at full speed on MAME on a 20 year old PC is honestly nothing short of amazing, especially on the Transmeta Crusoe.
That wasn’t at full speed. But close to it.
To clarify, most of those glitches are down to it being an older version of MAME. The System 32's scaling and transformation effects were a bit janky until a couple of years ago, I remember getting a big nostalgia hit when the (actually mediocre) Spider Man game was free of obvious glitching.
I'm just confused why does the emulator run better than the OS it's being launched from.
@@segarallychampionship702
Probably McAfee hogging RAM and HDD.
"this video isn't about too much"
>Checks runtime
😂
Been loving the recent content! Keep it up 😃
this video is a Certified Cathode Ray Dude Short Video
Cathode ray dude always comes through!
Sony was a market leader in this stuff all throughout the 90's until Jony Ive got his hands on the computer design industry. The industrial designers at Sony had a way of making devices like these have a presence while keeping the looks almost the exact same no matter what the design of the device was. That takes some serious effort. Props, Sony.
On one hand, it's very sad to see Sony leaving the PC market. Even the last Vaios were still unique and interesting, the only ones that seem to follow on the novel concepts they used to do is the ROG laptops.
On the other hand, all of their computers were always driver hell so good riddance.
@@Fay7666 Steve Jobs actually went to Sony with MacOSX on a Viao (quite a well known story) which Sony turned down saying they've already perfected Windows on the viaos. They simply just couldn't be bothered to rewrite drivers for Unix in my opinion.
@@megatronskneecap Eh, you wouldn't want to depend for software on your main competitor and OSX is not lighter than Windows, so that makes sense.
How is OSX not lighter than windows? Windows still supports 16 bit, 32 bit and 64 bit and uses an ancient filesystem. Even HFS that Apple was using at the time was quicker than MSDOSFat. @@richardhunter9779
@@richardhunter9779 early OSX was absolutely heavier than WinXP, but 10.4 and 10.5 were much lighter than Vista. It made sense as a decision early-on, but by the middle of the decade was perhaps a bit more dubious.
I'm immersed in nostalgia.
Back when I was in junior high, I stumbled upon a C1R at a second-hand hardware shop, fell in love at first sight, and cherished it dearly. Its portability, being able to take it anywhere, was incredibly handy and I have fond memories of that.
I haven't thrown it away yet, so it's probably still lying somewhere in the warehouse.
@13:51 RIP ant
oh my god the ants. I have like 4 traps set up and they still get into shot sometimes. it's just a "western washington at this time of year" thing, exterminators say there's nothing we can do to keep them out, but man, it's frustrating. I did my best to keep them out of the video but I knew I'd miss one.
@@CathodeRayDudeI live in a basement so the ants waking up and trying to get into my kitchen is the real sign that spring is here.
@@CathodeRayDudeI tried the advion ant gel this year and it greatly reduced the number of ants crawling around. I believe it's what exterminators use instead of traps.
Raid max liquid traps worked last year, but didn't help this time.
Genuinely thought that was just a little bug on my screen heh
A pyrethrum-based spray will keep them out. Anything with an exoskeleton will not cross that perimeter, and is completely safe for mammals.
Couple of notes on VAIOisms...
First, I think (it's been a while) that blinking battery indicator was normal. IIRC, it double-blinks when it's charging, stops blinking when it gets close to full, and stays lit solid when you're running from battery. It'll start slowly blinking (50/50 duty cycle) again when the battery gets low. Something like that.
Firewire CD-ROMs were definitely a Sony thing. I have an R505, which was a Pentium III laptop that had a removable "media dock." That means it's a really thin laptop if you don't need floppy and CD drives, but it levers onto a second bottom-half that includes those drives, and replicated ports on the back. The optical drive (combo DVD-ROM / CD-RW drive) is actually connected via Firewire. There's no cable or anything, it's just part of the bespoke dock connector on the bottom, but that's the protocol it uses. This is noteworthy because it has consequences: I'm not sure how you would support it in DOS (by this point, I don't think it mattered much -- you could choose Windows 2000 Pro, but mine shipped with the new version of Windows called XP.) And if you didn't have the dock, you were in a world of hurt. USB boot wasn't supported. Just internal IDE, Firewire, and floppy.
The key to removing gross decomposing rubber and adhesive is to use WD40 first, then you can use isoprop or regular detergent to remove the WD40 residue. This case didn't seem too bad, but there's lots of adhesives that won't lift off with just a solvent. WD40 first solves that problem in one step. Remember this for those terrible stickers that leave a residue behind, WD40 is your friend.
thanks I’ve been having this problem
The worst day of my life was when I decided that, what with WD-40 being my friend and all, it would obviously be great for cleaning mechanical keyboards.
@@therealchriscunningham what happened
@@elephystry it de-clickied it. which is bad for the clicky.
@@therealchriscunningham if you felt like disassembling the switches and cleaning them, you might get the clicks back 😅 depending on whether the sharp click geometry just got too-lubricated, or whether you melted something.
I love that a video which "isn't about too much" is nearly 45 minutes long lmao. I love this channel.
2 decades ago, it was my dream laptop. thanks bro.
I would've thought it was cool, and honestly, compared to my desktop PC of the time it probably was faster, but man it would've been so expensive and kinda useless within 3 or so years.
I tested some Transmeta machines ages ago, and my main conclusion was that the Crusoe was a _weird_ chip. The code morphing it did was extremely workload-sensitive: the machine might be struggling with one task, and you'd try another expecting to get similar results, and while you usually would, it was far from unknown for the machine to sail through it at several times the speed you'd expect given the earlier outcome. I don't remember if they were able to get those speedups more consistently with updates, but it may be fun to look into.
Fun video--thanks!
I have a Transmeta Crusoe based thin client I use for retro gaming, its fantastic once you know its limitations, its a shame it didnt get more future versions that cover newer instruction sets
LOVED the Rush reference!
Man sony design language from the era was so good
I find these videos weirdly comforting. I have never had any friends into any sort of pc gaming or repair. Seering someone have 5he same insticts about making a pc work and using it is strangley good. I dont know if i can explain it.
as nice as the wide monitors like this are, displays with a vertical resolution lower than 768 pixels have so many issues with programs. In fact, that's why that oddball 1366x768 resolution was created- as a compatibility resolution for widescreen displays! So many legacy applications just outright crash if they can't do at least 1024x768.
So while the 1280x600 screen looks fantastic, there are so many limitations to that kind of thing and that probably limited their longterm viability (well, that and panel availability in general. Can't imagine there being many manufacturers of ultrawide 600p panels)
The interface on that camera software makes me think of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer wins some boudoir photography and the first thing the photog does is turn off the lights and slather the lens with vaseline ;)
Yup! Really enjoy watching cinema scope movies on my phone's 21:9 display. There's something special about it
You know what, I keep forgetting that phones often technically have ultra wide displays, and I need to keep that in mind when I eventually do my video on this subject. Thank you!
@@CathodeRayDude "technically" is pretty fair when you're talking about cinematic things. I know that a couple of directors etc complain that viewing things on a phone is not fair to things designed to be watched in a theatre.
@@CathodeRayDudeSony Xperia 1 III technically has a '4K' display at 21:9 ratio for pocketability, watching movies, shooting video, and using it as a external camera monitor. Though, the UI renders at 1080p and the only way you can get 4K is to push directly to the GPU's framebuffer.
They basically cut off the edges of the 4K resolution.
Not really sure how their recent Xperia 1 line function, though.
@@LibertyMonk we need fresnel lens viewing stands to extend the size, a-la Brazil.
or not...
That's a perfect sized laptop! They shouldn't make them any bigger!
I had one of those Sony USB floppy drives in my data center “rescue” kit along with a couple of boot floppies, usb serial adapter, a null modem adapter, a cat5 and an rj11 cable along with other miscellaneous crap for whatever server rescuing needed to be done.
Our tools don't say “Craftsman”, but they are craftsmen's tools.
i wish thisform factor would come back id love a chromebook like this
thankyou so much for pausing the voiceover to let us listen to the XP login jingle - warmed my heart to hear it again.
I had one of those (C1VP) back in high school in 2001. It was so cool to have a laptop that small. I kept it in my backpack and took it everywhere. It came with ME, but upgraded it to XP once it came out. It was painful getting the drivers for the jogdial, hotkeys and camera to work, but after playing with different versions from different models, I finally figured out a set that worked. Used a CD travel case as a bag for it.
I love these little guys, as borderline useless as most of them might be these days. I used to use a very small Dell with a ten-inch, ultra wide screen with a 3rd generation i3 CPU and 6GB of RAM permanently affixed to the motherboard so you couldn't increase the amount without going through a great deal of trouble. I did get rid of the 750GM mechanical hard drive and swapped it for a Samsung EVO SATA solid state drive with 2TB of space on it. It's my mini media player. I use it to watch videos and listen to music, and when I need a 4th screen for doing school assignments it's great for displaying a webpage of two. It's definitely a little clunky and I've spent a little time, money, and effort just to get it useable and keep it that way, but I get way more use out of it than I thought I would when my mom asked me if I wanted it before she took it to the e-waste center.
Dude I looked for a good history video about the Crusoe from like Asianometry or something, but there is NOTHING. You could do the Internet a real solid with one.
I love how surprised you were with how well it ran an emulator!
We are the priests
Of the temple
Of Citrix
All the cast-off computers
Fill these online halls
(Epic 15 minute prog guitar montage! 🎸)
it's the GPD win about 20 years earlier
Gpd win-10
I have a Win-3 and it really feels like the Vaio UX
(That i wanted as a child. But the win-3 exactly can be used)
I'm really annoyed that the new mini machines aren't like these. These had no gimmick (except maybe the jog dial and their silly memory cards), and were just good laptops.
@@alexcrouse the win is there a gaming line, you sound like you want the pocket
GPD Loss
I've had luck doing the following to replace feet in these types of cases:
1) Buy a tube of silicone gasket maker from Harbor Freight. The black kind.
2) Spoot some out on a piece of waxed paper.
3) Put another piece of waxed paper on top of it.
4) Use a credit card to flatten it out to the right thickness for your needs.
5) Wait a day for it to dry.
6) Peel the waxed paper off to retrieve your silicone sheet.
7) Use X-Acto knife to cut out the shaped feet that you need.
8) Get some of that double sided tape meant to keep cats from scratching up your furniture, and use that to stick it to your footless device in the foot holes.
I had the Pentium one and then the first Crusoe one with a brand new battery and cardslot wifi card (and cardslot CD ROM) - loved them, was the perfect machine to run a Primera disc printer at work in a cramped space cos it was so small it could sit on top of the damn printer. The hinges are the weak point, and the old one which used a small proprietary fragile rectangular DC jack. Worked fine with Windows 2000, the LCD was really good for the time too
i love the transmeta chips, i want one to play w/sometimes, they might be terrible but they are so insanely cool in how they work
I keep hearing "100% Compatible" as the jingle Ashens came up with in one of his Fake Lego videos.
“NATURALLY….”
*Muscle memory action off camera and a pause*
Back into frame with a FireWire beast😂😂
Thank you for making these, they’re much more therapeutic than you know.
I just love Sony things from the 2000’s
Vaio tiny laptops. Clie PDA’s that look amazing. Freaking Aibo robots
I have a camcorder from 2006, the Sony Handycam DCR-HC46
I had what was I think the lowest end colour PDA that Sony offered at the time, a Clie SJ-22 and even at that end of the market it was a great device. Rugged, excellent design and usability for a sub-$200 price. The jog wheel was a great addition to PalmOS. I got it in Fall 2003 and carried it everywhere with me daily right up until I got my first smartphone in 2010.
I miss my PictureBook C1X - the original model that was available in the US with its Pentium MMX 266 MHz and 64 MB RAM. The various models were significantly different.
25:10 Omfg that sent me into a fit at work 😂 🤣 ⚰️ ⚰️ I’m unemployed now.
27:27, "I don't feel too good Mr. Stark..."
That Mame working immediately got me thinking about those super widescreen games that existed...
Running MAME on the little machine that could reminds me of playing Sonic on my father's Toshiba Libretto when I was still in secondary school.
I like those kind of laid back videos where you give an old computer a tour.,,
Goo-Gone is the best when you're dealing with _adhesives_ because it will dissolve them. With IPA, you might end up lifting it off the case, but it'll just ball up whatever the old label's media was (paper, e.g.), and leave sticky residue behind.
OTOH, stuff like this, IPA is very effective. Except, yes, it'll remove ink -- whether you intended that or not. If you've got a sticky mess on a label, you're just going to have to choose whether you want it clean, or intact.
I also use Krud Kutter, which works GREAT for removing general environmental nastiness from plastic and metal. It doesn't tend to damage anything you care about. It's just a cleaner.
My 2c.
Thanks for the input, I appreciate it! I've heard of Krud Kutter a couple times, I'll check it out. And I wonder if the goo gone might do better with some really unfortunate soft-touch I'm dealing with on another machine...
For screens, I find that Windex tends to streak more than Sprayway Glass Cleaner, that I think came from Costco. That stuff is magic. It also really helps with picking up dust and cat hair, that tends to just wad up and stick on the edges of where you wipe with a plain damp (paper) towel.
Despite the subtile fan noise in the background I love it! 💚
i'm really surprised how few comments i've gotten about the fan noise, I thought it would put a lot of people off but nobody seems to mind. glad you enjoyed!
Always use blue window cleaner (refuse to call it Windex, because over here the prominent brand is Glassex) and a sheet of the cheapest noname kitchen roll. It has never flithied up or damaged any screen I cleaned with it, which is a lot. Be it glossy or matte, touch or nontouch, glass or plastic, LCD or CRT, it always cleans absolutely perfectly fine. Blue cleaner doesn't dissolve any protective layer, as it isn't alcohol based. I think it's more of an ammonia-based mixture actually, and ammonia is surprisingly mild.
I have heard that ammonia based cleaners are not good for plastic screens, as it slowly turns the plastics brown.
@@robertbackhaus8911 If that's true, it probably still counts as "mild". And it seems fine if you clean a screen no more than a few times per year. Just don't sneeze into your screen all the time, I suppose.
Nice video.
As for me, I’ll take pillar boxing all day over bars on the top and bottom. Full height looks better than having dead space above and below. And no stretching the image, ever.
that thing is adorable, I would have had so much fun with that thing back in the day!
there's nothing that annoys me more than the fact that early oughts laptops hold a charge basically forever, but my laptop from just a few years ago can't hold a charge for more than a day.
I love these "let's mess around with some neat electronics" videos. It is very relatable and interesting to listen to.
I hope that you enjoy creating this kind of content.
In its defence, the P3 celerons where an extremely good deal at that time. Especially shortly after with the Tualatins, I skipped the entire P4 era rocking one of those.
I bought a P4m laptop and liked it so much that I went with a P4 desktop. Prescott to be precise. I almost swore off of Intel after that. I had no idea that P4m and Netburst were so completely different.
@@extrameatsammich Do you mean PM? Pentium 4-M was a regular Northwood chip, Pentium M was the good one.
The Transmeta Crusoe was actually a special RISC processor that had special low level software running on it dubbed "code morphing software" that dynamically recompiled x86 instructions into it's native RISC ones, by taking shortcuts, combining multiple operations into one, and learning which instructions frequently get used and adapting to execute those faster. It will literally learn as it executes code to run that code faster the next time. It was actually really cool. Intel actually ripped off the design for their Atom line of processors, and got caught and sued by Transmeta, and I spoke to the engineer that discovered this theft. Transmeta ended up licensing it to Intel and this is now in the underpinnings of all Intel Core CPUs from the mid 2000s onward. Do you remember how the whole x86 industry hit a wall in the mid 2000s? Well it was Transmeta's technology that is to thank for modern Intel CPUs, which are all now actually RISC chips with translation layers over-top emulating the older CISC Intel x86 instruction set.
The idea that x86 in the mid-2000s and was saved by Transmeta's technology is hard to believe. Intel was running into a wall with the P4 design, and even IBM was struggling with a lack of generational gains in the Power architecture, instead pushing up clock speed at the cost of heat. AMD were doing well though, and they carried the momentum from the Athlon 64 (introducing the AMD64 instruction set) into multicore CPUs with the X2. What actually happened was that CPU manufacturers realised that clock speed gains were no longer a given and instead they needed to focus on efficiency gains and concurrency. This change wasn't all that unexpected, multi-cpu systems already existed in server and workstation hardware, and Intel had introduced Hyperthreading in the early 2000s. Parallel was just where things were heading already.
Intel Atom wasn't announced until March 2008 and came out in June that year. Even 45nm Wolfdale Core2 Duo's like the E8400 and E8500 were already available in January 2008 and Yorkfield Core2 Quad's like the Q9550 came out in March 2008 (or November 2007 for Yorkfield XE C2Q QX9650).
Intel's first internally RISC-like x86 CPU was the Pentium Pro in 1995 and most Intel CPUs have been like that ever since.
@@LordVarksonyour both right
Modern x86 CPUs are barely anything like the Transmeta chips.
A lot of the stuff such as decoding and optimization that is done in software on the Crusoe is done in hardware, and Intel was already doing this prior to the release of the Transmeta chips (since the Pentium Pro). There's no underlying VLIW core to be found, they produce micro-ops. In some sense, you could call that an "underlying VLIW core", but in principle you could write software that runs directly on the Crusoe (which is, in essence, what CMS is). You can't really write software in microcode on modern CPUs.
More than anything else, modern x86 CPUs (and even modern high-performance ARM!) look more like a cleaned up and optimized hybrid of the Pentium M/Athlon 64 and Pentium 4.
Moreover, the Transmeta patents in question aren't specific to their architecture at all. Some of them are even about out-of-order hardware execution of instructions, which I believe their CPUs don't use.
Minor mistake, the efficieon DID have a sort of speculative register file thing. It still was an in-order CPU to which out-of-order scheduling hardware patents would not apply.
I have a very similar laptop with a Crusoe 5800, a Fujitsu Lifebook P2110. I really liked it at the time. It was running NetBSD an was able to watch AVIs and DVD. The screen was very similar to this Sony. Great video!
Another option for slightly less solvent-y cleaners is good old wd-40. I'm sure it has weird interactions with some stuff but I've found it to be between isopropyl and windex in aggressiveness. It also nicely inactivates adhesive.
firewire was awesome and so under-appreciated, particularly for film.
I wish we had more machines in this form factor. Always been a fan of very unusual displays. :P
It's not so much that the Firewire port didn't have the power to run an optical drive from the bus, it's more that the connector Sony used for IEEE 1394/Firewire is only the 4 pin variety which AFAIK is signalling only, there's no significant power delivery present. Hence the weird secondary DC out port.
Whenever I hear that song I can still hear Jack Horkheimer saying, "Keep looking up!" on PBS' Star Hustler TV program coupled with cheesy computer animations. I loved that show.
The Rush reference filled me with joy
That's such a cool device. Reminds me of the first PC I ever bought, an eee 1008HA, in 2008/9.
The Picturebook C1xn I had included a 266MHz processor, a 4Gb hard drive, a 5Gb PCMCIA hard drive, swapped with the modem and Ethernet card and had a 1024x480 screen. The screen was bright, sharp and looked far better than the limited resolution suggested. I used it to code on my train journey in the morning and evening working. I had an iLink DVD drive but the cables and lack of a deck on the train meant it was impossible to watch a movie. The web camera rotated from front facing to rear facing and I used it as my first "digital camera". On the side it had a little wheel that ran through various set up options and volume control. It is still working, in a museum now where as later Vaio laptops have died.
The Transmeta Crusoe is actually a very interesting CPU.
Ars Technica has a pretty good article from the year 2000 that explains some of how it works so differently from your garden variety x86 CPU.
OMG a transmeta processor!!! I was sooooo on board with those when they were announced but boy did they flop.
I'm loving these smaller, casual looks at random tech. These are exa tlu the kinds of things i'd pick up if i had a little more money xD
We need more laptops in this size.
The PictureBook was the first laptop to have a webcam installed as standard. On the IBM PC110 PalmTop, Canon had produced a specific PCMCIA card webcam (eventually for other laptops top) for it that may predate the Vaio. And yes the ThinkPad 850 or 860 may have a webcam before the vaio, but not standard, it was an expensive upgrade.
pillar boxing, imho, is less of a problem with something like oled, where the black pixels in the pillars are just off, and not giant grey blocks to the side. in a dark room watching a movie/show, it's difficult to notice unless you're picking nits
Picking nits is kinda his whole deal.
@@CantankerousDave PIcking nits is what you do on an LCD. On an OLED the black border is 0 nits.
I owned the VERY FIRST NEC Ultralite with the 2mb silicon hard disk. It was the first, and for a short time, the only true notebook computer. I absolutely loved it lithium-metal exploding battery and all. This machine reminded me of that. Ahead of its time.
I remember seeing these tiny laptops in the shop as a kid and thinking they were so cool and always wanting one! Unfortunately the industry didnt keep this small form factor, palm tops died off, Nokia communicators came and went, netbooks came and went then somewhere along the line we switched to having android tablets.
Id still love to have a modern Vaio C1. Im just in love with that tiny form factor. Although my android tablet with a keyboard could probably do the job just fine but I just love playing around with gadgets. Id use it like a netbook or chromebook. youtube/netflix, browsing the net, emails and maybe some retro gaming.
I might actually look at picking up a GPD pocket 3 because of this video haha
Reminds me of this modern tiny laptop I have, it might only have a intel n100 in it, but it's able to emulate gamecube now with almost no problems.
D-Limonene, the active ingredient in Goo-gone and Goof-off, amongst other adhesive and residue removers, is extremely effective but can also melt certain types of plastics. It's also exceptionally good at ripping the dye out of things like printed labels, so I don't recommend using it on those kinds of things. But if you do happen to have a problem of labels and adhesive on things it doesn't dissolve, then limonene is a fantastic solution for them. It also dissolves chewing gum, butyl rubber, some types of resin, and a variety of other compounds. Great stuff to have around. Just remember to store it well because the vapor pressure of limonene isn't particularly high, so it's quite volatile and will happily evaporate away from a poorly sealed container in the same way that mineral spirits will disappear on you.
On a side note, you can actually make a putty-like plastic filler out of limonene in a similar way to acetone by just dissolving a bunch of styrene into it until it forms a very viscous and sculptable goo. Pack it into whatever needs filling with a putty knife and then wait for the limonene to evaporate.
I wouldn't be opposed to more videos like this!
Damn it, now I've got the "let's ask the internet" jingle stuck in my head. I'm humming it, I'm whistling it, I will probably eventually try to play it on my saxophone
...i would very much like to hear that lol
Built-in camera provides high-quality images!
Watching Dirty Harry like it was intended is the reason I bought my 21:9 U3415W about a decade ago now. Now I'm looking at ultrawide OLEDs.
2:45 fun fact the now standard 16:9 ratio was first proposed by SMPTE in 1984 specifically because it was the geometric mean between Cinema ratio and 4:3, a "mathematically ideal" compromise between the two
whoa, really? do you happen to have a citeable source, that'd be a great one to have when i get around to the video i wanna make!
@@CathodeRayDude its in the wikipedia page for "16:9 aspect ratio" there's a whole bunch of detail there
literally 1984
Had a slightly bigger Crusoe powered Fujitsu laptop back in the day (11.6" rings a bell, that might have been the laptop that replaced it). Was replacement for a Toshiba Libretto so I was quite used to slow. Was my main laptop for about 3 years.
Think Centrino killed them off.
Really good for power consumption.
I travelled a lot. Ran MAME great.
Been really enjoying the videos CRD! And just wanted to let you know ❤
ISTR the Crusoe supposedly could "learn" from running programs how to optimize its working, so the first run would be atrocious, but would improve with iterations. If I remember well, they had for a time a rather famous engineer you might have heard of, named Linus Thorvald who once built a little i80386 OS, nothing professional.
For cleaning, white gas/lighter fluid. Smaller containers from Zippo or similar, or by the gallon from Coleman, as examples. Good for taking label adhesives off, not likely to damage printing and paints.
Long story short. that P series on the left. I was an authorized SONY VAIO dealer in my small IT shop for 4 years. I sold a couple P series to some very well dressed business men who wanted the ultralight travel experience. I played around with it in the shop it was a bad experience like every "netbook" was.
Thank you for the anecdote because this is exactly what I figured, that those things existed in order to be sold as jewelry to people with more money than sense, hahaha.
More smol computers! It's so good!
One of the absolute best laptops I ever owned was a VAIO. It was a first gen i7 and it managed to stay cool even when compiling for hours on all threads. Totally blew me away that was even possible at the time.
ive got an old hp compaq nc6400 would be cool to make a video on maybe i might some time
I have a transmeta c1 picturebook, i love using it to run vintage games because what a ridiculous thing to play games on. As a teen I LUSTED after the picturebook, tiny computing has been a dream of mine since i was young and gpd finally made it happen
I’ve been using my Vaio for a few projects recently. It’s not as cool as this (just a generic thing from the BX line) but even that makes me go “dang, Sony made cool computers”. Fingerprint reader? Yes. Cool memorystick reader? Yes. Dock? YES! Nice metal chassis? Yes.
All round a classy machine.
Remove manufactured by Smith and Nephew is a medical grade adhesive remover that is used to remove bandage adhesive from humans. It is by far the best adhesive remover I've used in my professional life and it's gentle enough for most plastics
interesting, never heard of that. I'll get some and give it a shot!
@@CathodeRayDude it is a little oily but it cleans up without too much fuss
I have a C1-MSX! I loved it back in the day, I should get it running again...
One of my dad's work laptops had exactly the same issue with the nub: any input would result in it slowly creeping to the top-left. I think it went away with exercise like it did here, but I don't remember for certain. It was a mid-90s IBM ThinkPad.
I wish I still had his old work computers. His first laptop had an absolutely appalling purple monochromatic display with horrendous ghosting - the kind of thing that renders mouse trails kind of a necessity - but I still played games on it (mainly Lemmings from what I recall). It was computer beige and I believe it was a Compaq.
The second was a "luggable" - a big heavy box with a keyboard that clipped off the side to reveal its full colour screen. The keyboard cable was coiled like telephone handset cord and at it was a massive step up in power. I used to play Doom on it, including multiplayer with my cousin. I don't recall the brand, but it was dark grey and I think it has a fairly impressive array of ports on the side.
Then it was the ThinkPad. Or maybe there was a sequence of a few? Hard to say since they look pretty similar. It was long before they added the trackpad, but it did have a CD drive, which was exciting, and the rubber on the nub gradually wore away until the post stuck through. It had some sort og rapid application development platform on it (Borland Delphi I think); poking around the example projects in that was how I learnt about powers of two and using bitmasks to efficiently store flags (they weren't presented in binary, so I had a delightful moment of discovery when I realized how the powers slotted in around each other without interfering with one another).
I'm not really going anywhere with this. Just reminiscing.
aww , this laptop is so pprecius, really loved seeing it shown of like this, honestly ideal style of machine
Top tip: textile/fabric foam cleaner is great to clean devices. Spray it on, leave it for 20 seconds or so and most of the dirt will wipe off easily.
This is the perfect size for a laptop.
I don’t know why they make any other size laptop.
A friend had a small vauo like that one it got tossed out of the window on the first floor (while in the laptop bag) and walked overby 20 firemen during a fire and we found it back next day and it still worked 😊😊 still amazed by it after 24 years
Amazingly, I have had really good luck with hand sanitizers! The alcohol content works just like it did in this video, but (maybe only some and not all) plain unscented hand sanitizers have glycerol which in this context acts as a mild soap.
3:20 It's of course subjective, but pillarboxing is perfectly fine by me IF the backlight of the screen isn't turning it light grey. If it's black or near black (like with OLED), it's fine. Or the "Ambient Mode" that TH-cam does nowadays (or that we did ourselves with e.g. Philips hue lamps and their HDMI box) which makes the borders colored in a way that works with the scene. But yeah, Pillarboxing on some mid-2000's TN display is distracting :)
loving this laptop, had one in my uni days, mine was c1vj I think, its from the time when sony was coool. mw was the one that I wanted but it was too expensive
I like this sort of thing
Its so nice when the scaling works and so painful when the player/encoding of the video doesnt allow the content to scale up correctly.
Never had a Sony Vaio laptop, netbook or otherwise but I've always liked the blue-ish purple-ish color scheme and the fact that Sony always did things just a little different than other computer manufacturers.
Delightful. Thanks for making this video.
God, seeing SonicStage on that jog dial list gave me war flashbacks. I don’t miss it!
I had a similar one (Sony Vaio TR2MP) around 2004. I bought it used at a computer market in London. It was surprisingly good. The camera, for the time, was great (you have to remember that webcams were still not that common and mostly rotten potato quality).
It was great to watch movies on long flights. IFEs back then still had tiny, low-quality screens, and limited content selection. The battery was enough to be practical during an overnight 16h flight (probably 4hs+ of video playback, can't remember exactly).
I sold it after the Windows XP SP2 came out, as it became so slow that it was almost unusable. I sold it for the same price I had bought it (try to do that with any laptop that's not an Apple. Vaios were good).