Well, finally I've got myself a new laptop: a Sony SZ1XP. Great machine overall, but with several bad points. One should ponder if these points are really bad...

First, the good points:

  • Great screen. And I mean this. I've looked upon a large number of screens in my life, and this is the best LCD I've used so far. It's like the PSP screen, just bigger.
  • Horsepower. Well, it looks like compile-wise, it's almost as good as my x64 desktop. It takes about 33 mins @ 1Ghz to compile the default SMP kernel on SuSE 10.1
  • Battery. I don't really know how good the power management ison this thing in linux, but 2:20h (approx) on compiling kernels (make && make clean loops) looks pretty good to me

And now the bad ones:

  • Keyboard sucks big time. The spacebar has a dead zone (i.e. if you don't really press it in the centre, nothing happens). For a 2000+ euro machine, it's pretty disappointing.
  • No brightness support on linux. This really sucks too, because the screen drains some power, even if it's LED-based. Rumor has it that it's an ACPI problem (the FN keys sometimes work)
  • the cdrom looks very flimsy. DON'T play too much with it's "panel". It might break.

That's it about appearence and build quality... Episode 2 will follow linux setup.

-- This is a really old post published originally on my blogspot blog