VAIO P, now with more Windows 7
By Paul Miller 
posted January 10th 2009 7:40PM
posted January 10th 2009 7:40PM
- It boots fast! Not that Vista was that bad on the boot front, but we're pretty happy with this.
- No Aero. That's to be expected, but the lack of transparency and visual effects makes the OS look quite a bit different than most of the screenshots out there.
- It's very responsive. To be honest, a lot of that could be from the fact that this is a clean install, minus all the crap Sony loads on. Still, we're very happy for the start menu to pop open instantly, windows to redraw like God intended... it's pretty great.
- Browsing is 100% better. Internet Explorer pops open in a flash, and pages load in times nearly on comparison with "real" computers. Also, scrolling is ultra smooth, whereas with Vista it was stuttery all the way down.
- There's a lot more to explore. We've just scratched the surface, but we love what we've seen so far.
Update 2: for those who've asked: yes, the webcam works, and no, we haven't had any luck getting Aero up and running, though we have the video drivers loaded -- we're not saying it's impossible, in fact, it's likely very possible, since plenty of other similarly specced netbooks can pull it off, but it's just not happening for us just yet.
sweet
Yes! now this is what I've been waiting for.
Please quote some sort of battery life Engadget! That's the only thing standing between me and a purchase of this thing.
Another smack on the VAIOp's ass for lacking a touchscreen. What were they thinking? It's already small and lack a touchpad.... what else are touchscreens for?
I'm waiting for that W7 touchscreen netbook to put my hard earned $$$ into.
sony's website says 4 hours.
what's with all this touchscreen obssession? people complain about glossiness, and guess what a screen will look like with your grubby fingers on it?
and people complain about price, and guess what a touchscreen will do to the price?
i would love to have a touchscreen laptop, but surely i wouldn't pay a few hundred dollars premium just for it
Recently a friend of mine bought one of those Atom powered Lenovo X200 or X400 (i cant remember) was freakishly expensive it was small had the dot in the keyboard also had touchscreen ..... I used a bluetooth mouse.
Touchscreen is not really that good and not for every single device.
Yeah ... a touchscreen for a vertical surface. What a bunch of morons. Like that's going to really help the user experience. Should be a real treat in terms of smeary screens, strained muscles and lack of precision control. But hey ... at least it'll be touchscreen. And that's like godhood right there .... //end rant.
Engadget Try to lower the Resolution & then enable Areo, it just may work.
This Vaio looks likes it suffers from the same problem as the Toshiba Libretto U100 which had a 7 inch screen. The text is too small to read especially when in places like Starbucks where you may be some distance from the screen.
I think a standard 8.9 inch screen or 10 inch screen is absolutely essential.
Sorry guys had to piggyback to the top - you have to retake the Windows Experience test after installing graphics drivers to enable aero :)
@someone, what does what one group of people want (a touch screen) have to do with what another group is complaining about (glossiness)?
I had a Fujitsu B series, which is a notebook form factor with a touch screen. It was quite suboptimal compared to a convertible tablet, but still better than nothing. A stiff hinge helps.
But I think what is really needed is something as well/beautifully designed as the vaio p that is a convertible tablet. Most tablet designs are quite clunky. However it wouldn't be a vaio p because the screen height is too short to be sensible as a tablet.
i have a vaio z11znb its so beautiful and fast, and i get over five hours of battery time, i just wanted to share that for no reason, 4gb ram 1gb just for th heck of it!!!!!!!
Microsoft didnt fix UAC. You still have to "allow" the same programs at every boot. It doesnt remember shite. Also if you turn UAC off sidebar no longer works.
First!
Nice, waiting for the impressions
Not..
@Nathan.
Foolish fool!, and this is a first.
@ Nathan: I low rank thee!!!
If you didn't sit around waiting so long for the impressions, maybe you could have actually been first...
Sex in a bottle :P
Verry Nice!
Frried rrice
What are the specs of this machine? Does it have the regular 60 GB HDD or the 64 or 128 GB SSD?
Now install a decent browser on it :P
There is a decent browser on it: it's called IE8.
If it had been IE7, then yeah, I guess that wouldn't have been decent enough. But IE8 has really changed what IE was, and it's not a so-so browser anymore. My favorite parts are the Accelerators and the fantastic Search box. It's also pretty speedy as well.
IE8 is as decent as it gets.
as much as i hate to admit it
ive been using ie8 for a while and its faster than firefox 3 o.O
I use chrome as my main browser and IE8 for anything else, and its good, surprisingly good, for IE.
Compares to IE, and even more so, Firefox seems slow, which is a shame, as its the browser that made MS give us something so much better than the utter junk that was IE6, ect!
@ Kaikai
Speed isn't everything...
But I agree that Microsoft has made huge improvements to IE, and just like all else to bee seen in windows 7, the new interface is really streamlined to work intuitively for the user.
minefields pre-beta is faster.
Nice, windows 7 is fantastic, been using it as my main OS since yesterday, I dont need to boot back into Vista (Which i like anyway), its that good.
It seems a bit lighter, any chance of some benchmarks? Vista V 7?
Do you have any complaints? I've been curious about making the switch myself. Anything that's not working? Etc.?
Thanks!
Do it do it do it!
It is the, eh how you call it, bomb!
Everything that worked on Vista worked in Windows 7, Chrome has some problems, but its easy to fix!
As with a beta OS, some things are not 100% all the time, but nothing bads happened to me, my nVidia driver crashed after it was installed, once, been gaming for a few hours and no problems!
I couldn't install intels bus drivers without putting it in Vista computability mode, but that doesn't matter, all vista drivers work!
I have it installed on a slower HDD than vista ( partition'ed 500gig 7.2k RPM standard V 80gig velociraptor (sata II) )
And its just as fast booting ect.
It runs really fast, I would do it!
My pc: http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=449565
Thanks!
Once your nice and settled in. Get rid of vista.
Initially, I did a clean install on a seperate partition, but after realizing how amazing Windows 7 was, I used the upgrade funtion. No more vista for me. Just xp and 7 on my windows machines now.
Windows 7 without Aero makes me kind of sad.
I would have to agree, basic on Win7 looks even worse than basic on Vista!
The lack of Aero is strange, considering it worked firn when I installed it on my Dell Mini 9. However, it wouldn't resume from standby, which was a dealbreaker for me. Do the standby and hibernate functions work on it?
Aero works perfectly on the Acer Aspire One (which is also cheaper)
Aero works fine on my Pentium 4 desktop with 1gb ram and a 6800 GT(4 yr old machine,running XP 2 days ago). It surprises me that it doesn't work on any brand new PC.
Windows 7 is quite usable without Aero, more usable than Vista.
and Aero Shake works without Aero...go figure.
Vaio P's VGA is GMA500. Its 3D acceleration ability is about half of GMA950, which most netbooks are using. It's still capable hardware playback, but media player has to enable HD acceleration. I wonder if WMP 12 can play HD videos.
Yeah - can't wait to hear more about this!
Is it possible to scale the GUI now or is Windows still resolution dependant? That friggin' screen sure needs it.
Vista already is completely resolution independent...
Good job not looking at the entire gallery. What did you expect during the setup? It's an obscure display ratio and the necessary drivers needed to be loaded. Once it was installed it was fine.
@The dude:
What are you talking about? I did look at the entire gallery and the GUI is still really really tiny. No GUI scaling documented...
I expect that while it will run, you'll have much more luck running the Netbook optimized version of Windows 7 when it comes out.
Microsoft have already stated there will not be a special version of 7 for netbooks. 7 works on netbooks fine without anything cut down as Engadget have shown.
I'd like to know if this OS picked up and can work with all the USB ports, the web cam, etc. Please post a video showing startup and use!
Windows 7 will work with any Vista driver, so, yes it will work!
Windows 7 picked up every single one of my drivers (bar intel bus drivers, just used vista ones)