Sony's 1999 Forward Looking Vaio Slimtop PC

i'm not usually a collector of pre-built pcs i've always liked to start from scratch and build something that exactly suits my needs but there are times where going pre-built could have offered interesting features that you just can't get elsewhere this sony vaio slim top from 1999 is a good example of this it's small easy to set up and came with a digital lcd monitor i've been keeping an eye open for one of these for a few years after missing a chance to get one at a thrift store and it was worth it i picked up this example of a pcv l630 recently and am very happy with how complete and original it is this system doesn't really get to claim any historical firsts but it did take a number of cutting edge features and packaged them into a sleek pretty and easy to use system and today i want to take a look at how well it struck its balance between form and function a computer made by sony like this was somewhat new in the u.s but sony has had a rich history in computers and technology in general long before they made pcs they started out prominently in the electronic computing field with calculators in the sobox line one of which i have and reviewed in an earlier video on my channel as microcomputers flourish they found success in building msx systems these were especially popular in sony's home country of japan but never really gained traction in the us where pc compatibles were quickly becoming the norm by the mid 90s sony had moved away from msx systems and onto pcs with the majority of the industry and had created a line of more premium computers under the name vaio they originally launched trying to differentiate themselves from normal pcs with a novelty software interface and heavy multimedia focus the multimedia features were very prominent as vio stood for video audio integrated operation trying to leverage sony's already reputable name in the media industry the system i have here is two years into their pc launch in the us while my slimtop lacks the intriguing but admittedly cliche 3d shell it does have most of the multimedia features you could ever want for 19.99 although at an original price of 3 000 it better and especially with the pcv l630 upgraded model i have here but we'll get into that more later the design of this computer is part of sony's first generation of pcs with a lilac style meant to seem more natural the look it has was also a taste of what was to come as computers shifted away from beige boxes and added a splash of color but it hasn't fallen into some of the traps that many things did like artificial metal flake paint and is instead completely flat in appearance this combination gives it a smooth and cool look that almost feels out of place once you realize that it's running windows 98 and not windows xp or vista despite looking so plain on the front with only a dvd drive being immediately visible it actually has a robust assortment of i o hidden above the dvd drive is a three and a half inch floppy drive that uses the accent trim to blend in below that is a panel hiding all manner of connectors an audio input and headphone output with volume control pcmcia and memory stick slots and ilink and usb on the rear we have parallel serial vga and another set of usb audio and full size eye link connectors the main video and ps2 connectors are also here now on the last video i did on refurbishing this system these striking visual details caused some in the comments to draw comparisons to max and there are some similarities the system has an unusual design like max the mouse connects to the keyboard with one cable for both connected to the computer like max and it had a few high-end features and moderate performance at a high price like max so you probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that apple sued them over the design except they didn't quite the opposite in fact because steve jobs was so enamored with sony's vios that he had a version of os x created to run on a vial laptop and pitched a partnership with sony to sell vios with os x i'm not kidding i'll link the article in the description sony rejected the idea but it's interesting to think that this system could have been sold with mac os on it now this computer is more than just a pretty face so let's take a look at the hardware itself on first appearances with its slim disk drives and pcmcia slot you may think this computer is just a laptop in a larger case with an external display but the parts inside tell a different story at its core is a socket 370 600 megahertz pentium 3 cpu a new but mid-tier performing chip for the day the computer would have shipped with a 128 megabyte stick of full-sized sdram but the example i have here has been upgraded to 256 megabytes with a second stick the computer should have also come with a pci modem card that was replaced at some point with an ethernet controller and had a usb card added it also has a full size three and a half inch hard drive which would have originally been 17 gigabytes but had to be replaced by me after showing signs of failing on board it has an real vortex advantage 8810 sound card which is a lower cost part but has some great features and then it has an ati rage 128 pro connected directly over the forex agp bus this would have been a pretty good middle grade system the entire computer has clearly made some concessions to beat slim and small so these components aren't all top of the line but you wouldn't be buying this as a high performance system so that isn't surprising now the lcd is the most significant feature of this computer because again this system is from 1999 which saw desktop lcds as the bleeding edge even though portables were using flat panel displays since the 80s they were never really good just a better option than crts for small devices it wasn't until active matrix displays were introduced that they didn't require significant visual sacrifices compared to crts then they started to become more acceptable for desktop use but it was really when digital outputs like dvi and dfp came out that they took off and this computer was right on the forefront of that so when it came with a 15 inch by 768 digital interface lcd it was no small part of what made this system unique when you go to connect the display one of the first things you'll notice is that it has a proprietary interface connector that even tells you it's only for this panel this is in the same mdr connector family as dfp but is slightly larger because it also carries power audio and potentially usb for an included notification led the ati rage 128 pro driving the panel was available as an agp add-in card with a dvi connector so despite its custom physical interface it is using the new standard panel link protocol which puts it on par with dvi or dfp the single cable setup is a nice touch for making the computer easy to put together but does kind of suck for upgrades since you could never really get a better digital display for it i mentioned this interface also carries audio that is for the stereo speakers integrated into the display the drivers are on each side and they sound surprisingly good for their size the display also came with a permanently attached two pivot point stand which gives it a large amount of flexibility in how you can angle it although sony had a very specific angle in mind for ergonomics if you check the manual but that may have been for contrast because i would say that this makes for a good but not great early desktop lcd experience despite the newness of the technology there were already higher end models available such as this viewsonic vg180 which i can actually compare this to because i have a viewsonic vg181 that i believe the only difference is the addition of a dvi port viewsonic was coy with the details on this panel but i think it's an early ips display based on competing models the vg180s 2800 price tag and the 160 degree viewing angles the slim tops lcd can't even come close to competing here with its more common tn panel and this is especially noticeable with darker images where it can be difficult to find an angle that makes it easy to see the entire image while maintaining deeper blacks but the vg180 cost more than the base model of this computer with the lcd comparing this lcd to other available panels and pre-builts i'm guessing it would have been around 800 to a thousand dollars if sold separately so it's completely acceptable for what it is but it can best the vg180 in some aspects because my vg181 here is connected over analog vga while the via monitor is connected digitally the vga lcd needs to re-sync when the resolution changes the vio immediately changes though because it is connected digitally when you're used to vga lcds taking a long time to switch this is extremely noticeable and feels impressive as you use it the digital video also gives razor sharp images it's not comparable to the vg181 though here as it's scaling because there are different native resolutions on that the sony will scale lower resolutions up and down so quite well maintaining a sharp clear image without blurring the larger pixels too much but the native 1024 by 768 resolution image is pixel perfect whereas vga frequently blurs at least a little bit horizontally individual pixels are clear as day and the image fits the display perfectly there are no controls on the monitor other than brightness and volume because the digital image never needs adjustment this is an experience few people would have had on a system based on dos running windows 98 and feels very modern compared to the fine tuning needed for crts speaking of windows let's shift to taking a look at what some of the little tweaks made to the system by sony are and what it's like using it the installation of windows on this particular computer is nearly stock i'm not sure if it was barely used or if the os was reinstalled before the original owner parted with it but either way it's a great example of it immediately on startup you may notice that it takes a while for the wallpaper to load this computer has an active desktop wallpaper which was a feature in windows for a while to use a web page as your background and this might just be my most favorite example of this i've ever seen the default wallpaper on this computer comes in four different versions for dawn day dusk and night the web page has a js script running that checks what time it is and changes the wallpaper throughout the day to mimic a daylight cycle something you would know i'm a fan of if you saw my video on putting lights up to do the same thing there is one small problem though the script has a self-referencing function call every minute to see if it should change the wallpaper and that will create an unending call stack which is exactly the kind of issue that gave active desktop a bad rap as a resource hog now to go along with the multimedia features this also came with media playback programs including a dvd player something you typically had to pay for at the time i enjoyed watching some music videos on it but i would agree with most of the reviews at the time that nobody really wants to watch a whole movie sitting at their computer something else that came with the computer that is kind of strange was a sort of office suite that as far as i can tell was actually made by sony i mean cool but even at this time most people were just using microsoft office another nice touch on this computer are the buttons along the top of the keyboard these are programmable using sony's ppk software and can be used to launch programs not something i really care about but it wasn't a bad idea another thing that this works with that i'm not really a fan of is the memory stick slot if you had a sony digital camera you could use their proprietary memory stick format to transfer pictures and the ppk software would auto launch your photo manager of choice since memory stick also made the psp overpriced as a media player and was part of the downfall of the vita i don't much care for it now let's finally move on to talk about games and its performance i put this computer through its paces with a number of games with mixed results it can run some contemporary games just fine but trying to run more complicated games from this time runs into an issue that is mostly unsolvable the vram cards based on the ati rage 128 pro work normally equipped with 16 megabytes of vram and available with up to 32 this has 8. this makes the gpu the biggest bottleneck on the system without a doubt anything that runs on it runs great but it just hits a brick wall when it's doing too much and slows to a crawl i found it was best to expect it to run anything that a voodoo 2 can because of the vram just a bit faster because it is a better gpu it unfortunately is not really replaceable either though since it's on the motherboard sure i could get a pci card and use the switch on the motherboard to disable it but then i lose the lcd the whole point of owning this computer so it doesn't make any sense to do that now i'd mentioned that my pcv l630 is an upgraded model and the gpu was actually the most significant portion of that elsewise the base model pcv l400 with a 400 megahertz pentium 2 and the 500 megahertz pentium 3 pcv l600 came with a 4 megabyte ati rage pro lt so even though the 8 megabyte leaves something to be desired it could have been a lot worse thankfully the more powerful 600 megahertz p3 in here can pick up the slack for some games that rely on it more like zoo tycoon which needs more cpu power than you might think for a 2d game but this computer just really wasn't meant to play games it was a stylish media system that came with a better video card because it needed it for better mpeg2 decoding to use the dvd drive that the pcv l630 also added and that doesn't require a lot of vram at least thanks to the ulreal vortex sound card it can also run dos games with full midi sound very easily although this leads to two issues i had with this system for games the all-real drivers that came with this computer were either broken or incomplete because the sound for dos hopper wasn't working in dos mode or the windows dos box thankfully i was able to get some different drivers from vogons that worked with it and fix this issue the other big problem was that some games running in 320 by 240 would just show black like sonic 3d blast here i don't know what was causing this but installing the drivers to fix it was interesting because this rage 128 pro is unique for this computer with its low vram and its full display name of ati rage 128 pro 4xl and was a little confusing in the end i had to take a normal 128 pro driver and modify the inf file to add the pci product and vendor ids from the original drivers included with this system this allowed the new drivers to recognize the card and from there it worked flawlessly or at least as well as it can these were easily the biggest flaws with this system and are a bit of a shame because downloading new drivers over the internet and especially modifying them was not commonplace and this would have just been the average experience for owners of this computer everything else in here worked perfectly out of the box and i think that finishes covering what using this system was like when you do things that you would be expected to do with it it works very well it's small and has a reasonable number of ports for most peripherals a clear display that looks good although hopefully it looked much better when it was newer and if you don't mind being stuck in sony's memory stick system it even came with some actually good tools for easily working on photos video and audio it's fine for early 3d games and can just barely keep up with contemporary games on low settings all things considered i think this computer achieved its goals and looked good doing it and i'm happy to have added it to my collection a slight word of warning before i end this though if you like the look of this thing and want to try and get one now you really need to pay attention to the lcd matching the computer i'll link to a site below with some information on different models but there are a lot of revisions of this computer and the lcds are not all compatible even though most of them have the same connector so you should probably only pick one up if it comes with the lcd and the model number on the lcd matches the sticker by the connector but as long as they do you should be good i hope you enjoyed this look at the sony vaio slim top and if you did you might want to subscribe and if you want to support the channel i am on patreon and that actually really helps this is now the first video i've ever recorded with a proper teleprompter so i didn't have to look below the camera the entire time i was talking but that's it for now and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Tech Tangents

Views: 78,730

Rating: 4.9649272 out of 5

Keywords: main, computer, 1990s, Windows 9X, Computers, Sony, Vaio, Slimtop, 1999, Pentium, LCD, Display

Id: LxbcIZfe3x0

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021