Trying Sony's SMALLEST Laptop

this tiny little machine is one of my favorite laptops ever it's called the viop and it was very ahead of its time although probably too much so for its own good in this video I want to discuss what this particular device was all about and to see what it's like to actually use one in 2024 so let's Jump Right In the viop came out in 2009 right at a turning point in the laptop space back then notebooks were generally bulky power hungry and even if you had the occasional outlier that was Sleek those were also incredibly expensive however the late 2000s brought in the age of the netbook a product category That Grew wildly popular thanks to Intel's release of a low wattage chip called the Intel atam while these machines couldn't hold a candle to larger ones in terms of performance they were perfect for things like word processing Excel spreadsheets and simple web browsing which actually met the needs of most people however most importantly these devices were also very affordable we're talking anywhere between the $200 to $600 range in a landscape where traditional machines could easily cost double growing up I actually owned a gen one Asus e PC that cost us about $300 back in the day and while it ran a barebones build of Linux and was incredibly slow with its 512 megabytes of ram it was absolutely perfect for things like taking notes in class not only that but it worked so well for me at school that my teachers were also very on board to the point where they actually got the whole school to buy a fleet of them since they were so cheap I hold very strongly that netbooks walked so Chromebooks could run put that on my Tombstone why am I dying the popularity that netbooks saw ultimately led to faster developments in the space on both the hardware and software side allowing for more performance better battery life and optimizations in key areas such as video playback when it comes to later iterations of these devices which ultimately led us to the viop although as you'll find out this thing was far far far far from Fast the viop penis is real no no nope nope nope no we can't say that on YouTube now I should preface that we actually looked at this on the Austin Evans Channel A couple of years ago but it's been so long since then and I have no recollection of how well this thing actually worked so let me just open it up God I love the form factor of this it is so small let me power it on and see if it works [Music] oh the screen is on screen doesn't look half bad I mean the viewing angles are awful but uh considering that this is just a normal TFT LCD from 2009 yeah man text look totally fine you can see all this load in very sharp resolution for this very tiny screen that doesn't sound right all of this load oh no don't don't put words in my mouth that's what you said no I absolutely did not say yes you no I did not what did you say I don't know what I [Laughter] said now originally the viop was shipped running Windows Vista basic but here it seems like we worked on it because it is running Windows 10 which might actually be a problem because I think that this operating system might be a bit too clunky for the hardware that this particular laptop is equipped with we're talking uh if I go into our task manager which is taking forever to load uh bro this is taking forever I'm just trying to you know control all delete here come on I'm just trying to do basic things right now when I say that netbooks weren't fast I wasn't kidding this one in particular was probably one of the worst of the bunch we're talking single core Intel atom for 2009 and like 2 gigs of RAM you can't even open up task manager quick also so if you hear a bunch of growling coming out of this computer that is actually the physical hard drive we're talking a 1.8 in 60 gig drive that actually is spinning and mechanical it's not an SSD it's not emmc or anything like that that was pretty common on netbooks no this is just a standard spinning mechanical Drive which is probably adding to the sluggishness of this system not only that but we are literally 97 % usage on our disc in terms of bandwidth and 61% on our CPU just by doing nothing bro this thing is so slow but let me talk about what I actually like about this which is the form factor and the way that it is built man I seriously love the form factor of the vop especially how wide it is because it completely departs from the normal design of a laptop especially without a trackpad here what this means is that it relies on a little nubb in the middle to navigate around windows and you also have your mouse buttons on the bottom which wouldn't seem that comfortable at least looking at it from a distance but actually using it this is surprisingly intuitive and I must say that this particular vop actually is in decent condition turning on the screen I think there is one stray hot spot on here but otherwise it looks really nice I'm kind of surprised that there are no outstanding blemishes on here I mean certainly things that are wear and tear like maybe some scratches here and there but at least from a distance man this thing looks clean actually looking at it the port selection on here is also rather interesting so you have the standard you know two usba ports on here as well as a headphone jack and a barrel connector for your power but we also have I don't know if this is proprietary but we have a non-standard port here on the side which I imagine will probably be for things like video out is that a land no that's not for a land is it for a lanyard going to wear this on your neck that's like a mini lexic thort look at that I think that's exactly what that is dang I didn't know they made a mini version of that either that or that's just a random hole on the side of this laptop we are like oh this so useful it's so useful or good job Sony you put more holes in here that wasn't necessary and also because it is a Sony product from 2009 it can't go without a memory stick Duo slot cuz Sony things though pretty helpfully there is an SD card slot here as well for you normal people out there and also something interesting is that this is definitely a vop that came straight from Japan you can actually tell because it has our hirana characters on the keyboard which is actually kind of cool in fact you have a little button here to switch from Katakana hirana and romaji oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait I'm such a dumbass how could I not talk about the best part about this laptop the fact that it has a removable battery yeah repairability 2100 milliamps 16 wat hour oh that's not a lot I think Sony said that this would last somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 3 and 1/2 hours on a single charge even for a laptop back in the day that was uh that was that was kind of nothing wow look at this old Microsoft sticker for Windows Vista basic oh it has a product key so if you want to install it using my product key there you go will the battery actually hold a charge so this has been plugged in for I think about 2 hours now and uh what's not filling me with confidence is when I hit the battery icon here it says 0% so something's definitely a miss here if I just uh unplug it yep we killed it okay so the battery does not hold a charge but at least it does take power let me actually spend a little more time getting this vop set up I want to use it a bit more might do some software tweaks here I got some ideas on how I can make this a little better and more ideal to use and I'll be back with some thoughts all right I spent some time using the viop and my experience has been let's just say interesting first of all I ended up bypassing the original Windows 10 install on here here in favor of running this custom lightweight and portable version called tiny 10 which gets rid of a lot of the bloat that causes normal Windows 10 to chug on these machines now do note that we lose out on official updates from Microsoft which means there are security risks here to be aware of if you do decide to also do the same thing on Old machines you have lying around in your house so I wouldn't recommend this for serious use long term however for the sake of short-term novelty of trying out this tiny and awesome looking laptop why not right well the unfortunate thing is that even with tiny 10 this vop is still painfully slow quite literally the simplest tasks of today like opening up Edge or running Spotify throws the CPU into 100% usage leaving the computer hanging for chunks of annoying time and boy does it get this computer hot now I certainly have no doubts that I could be experiencing some bottlenecks by running a portable version of Windows off of a USB stick and that maybe a light build of Linux on an internal SSD could serve us better here but the consensus after searching around online is that regardless of what you do this computer is just very slow in general it's not to say you can't do nothing on here I actually could get the notepad up which runs pretty smooth and it gave me the opportunity at least to try out the keyboard while it's certainly less than ideal due to its tight spacing this keyboard is actually not awful Sony gave us a pretty comprehensive layout of keys considering the form factor which does give this a little bit of a pass though I think what's the most offensive here is the actual key press feel it is incredibly mushy to type on so much so that I actually question whether or not I hit certain keys or not it's a shame that this Hardware package is not up to enough because the vop could have made for a really good media consumption device considering its size in fact look to the right of our Mouse buttons here and you'll see a button for the cross media bar this is the exact same interface that Sony like to put on the PSP the PS3 this PSX behind me and a bunch of TVs back in the day but of course ported over to Windows for the viop as well as other sonyy computers sadly I couldn't get it working on this machine though it would have been awesome to at least experience it a little bit even if the media playback would have been somewhat sketchy circling back to the point that started this video I understand how profound it might be to call the vop one of my favorite laptops ever given how how impractical it is and especially considering that it costs a whopping $850 when it was new what the however what I seriously admire here is what Sony was really going for when you consider that handhelds like the steam deck and way more Boutique options like the GPD pocket are way more common these days I think that the vop form factor was seriously ahead of its time in a way that the hard Ware and software of this era couldn't really keep up maybe in another Universe where Sony still ran Vio perhaps we could have seen a reboot of this in 2024 but let me know if you would like that in the comments below and otherwise thanks for watching this video on Dany Channel

Channel: Denki

Views: 49,072

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Id: CtZCIVRkqgk

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024