  
European model of Sony's Ultra-portable notebook
This is a collection of all the information I have about the Sony VAIO
PCG-505E ultra-portable laptop. I bought mine in August 1999 with a
3rd party CD-ROM drive which has since packed up. It cost a whopping
£1300 including tax, the CD-ROM was an extra £120 (yup,
English pay anything for anything :)
Most people who have put info. up about this series of laptops live in
the 'States and use them for just arseing around on. I live in various
places around England and use it virtually every day for work and pleasure.
Equipment:
| Sony VAIO PCG-505E |
|
|
| 128Mb RAM - 6.4Gb hard disk |
(RAM upgrade >>) |
(noisy hard disk >>) |
| Amacom baby CD-ROM |
(Samsung drive with PCMCIA IDE interface) |
| Logitech Pilot Mouse PS2 |
|
|
| 3Com 3C589D PCMCIA Ethernet |
(BNC and RJ-45 dongle) |
(ethernet >>) |
| Adaptec 1460B SlimSCSI PCMCIA |
(CDR info >>) |
|
| Panasonic CW-7502 SCSI 4 X CD writer |
(CDR info >>) |
| Logitech USB Quickcam PRO |
(webcam >>) |
|
| Stickers - lots :) to cover up scratches |
|
|
| Wires - 4pin Firewire, Ethernet, Audio |
|
|
Support
In general, until I installed Windows 2000, the support was O.K. An internet
connection is vital for drivers and upgrades. The Sony website on the
whole is poor but the drivers are there if you look. Club VAIO registration
did not work for me so I've not been able to access it. Windows 2000 support
seems to be lagging for the European 505 models. There are BIOS
upgrades for the U.S. models but dire warnings if you install them
on non U.S. models.
Best thing to do is make a list of the exact revision levels of all the
hardware you have on your laptop and then visit each manufacturers website
to get the drivers. www.windrivers.com
is a good source of stuff.
The new Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 has improved things a bit. The computer
still wont Suspend or Shut down properly.
Dismantle one
I have taken the laptop to pieces a couple of times to have a look inside.
It takes a bit of forcing to get the little covers off near the battery but
other than that you can just undo all the big screws on the bottom of the unit,
open the screen and lift up the keyboard.
You have to unplug the keyboard and touchpad connectors to get a good look
under the top cover. You can just pull the thin film connectors out of the sockets
but you have to put them back properly by pulling the retaining clip up first.
There isn't much to see apart from the hard disk (I opened the laptop to measure
it to see if the IBM Travelstar would fit. IBM unit is about 1mm thicker than
the Toshiba) and the main motherboard with all the wires going to the sockets
and the screen.
When you reassemble, remember to plug the keyboard and touchpad back in
and make sure the bank of sockets on the left is correctly seated.
O.S.
It came preinstalled with Windows 98 but no office suite to speak of. I have
since installed:
By far the best suited to the laptop is Windows 98. Linux is very quick
(the quickest of all the above OSes) in 64Mb but can be a bit temperamental
at times, especially when ejecting or inserting PC-Cards, e.g. when
connecting to DHCP servers with the ethernet card.
I briefly had 2.4 kernel installed along with the associated modutils
and card services but it seemed to be less stable so I went back 2.2.13.
Also with the latest version of X (version 4) the display sometimes
locks and requires a hard reset (using a paperclip). Playing around
with "no_accel" and "hw_cursor" options in the XF86Config
file has helped.
Ethernet
When I bought the Adaptec SCSI card I also managed
to bag a second hand ethernet card. It is badged by Dell but is a 3Com
3C589D with a BNC and RJ-45 capable dongle. The BNC connector is a bit
dodgy now and I never use it, 'cos I've upgraded all my other network
cards to RJ-45.
Using a laptop is perfect for troubleshooting networks, I frequently
get called out by my dad to fix his network down at his
office, get the printer working etc. It provides a way of getting
data in and out of the laptop quickly with transfer speeds of 600Kb/sec
not uncommon on the University
internet connection and 800Kb/sec on smaller networks.
RAM Upgrade
I ordered a 64Mb upgrade at a cost of £76 (from www.mrmemory.co.uk),
which is now installed. Windows 2000 runs like Windows 95 used to, nice
a quick. It takes about 10 seconds to shutdown instead of 60. Mozilla
runs properly too. I recommend it definately.
Hard Disk
The Toshiba MK-6412MAT 6.4Gb disk installed in my laptop is the noisest
I have heard in recent years. I have a couple of desktop 340Mb IBM drives
which I have in a web server which are slightly noisier but they are
1993 vintage. It hums usually but every couple of minutes it will gradually
get louder then quieter again as if it is sighing because it is being
overworked.
I am currently looking at upgrading to an IBM Travelstar 20Gb version
which is touted as being super smooth and quiet, as well as having more
than twice as much space as my current disk :). They are about £175
at the moment.
Web Authoring
I mostly use it for web authoring, I have Apache and MySQL installed
to develop data driven websites. This ran very swiftly under Windows
98 but less so under Windows 2000 because of the higher memory overhead
of the latter O.S. This website and jonot.co.uk
were developed entirely on this baby and many more hundreds of
pages to come I'm sure.
CD-Burning
 
Using a second hand Adaptec 1460B Slim SCSI controller I have a Panasonic
/ Matsushita CDR drive connected via the PC-Card slot. This complete
setup cost £127 including tax. The drive was £80 from Gigabyte
in Swindon (supposed to be internal SCSI but I bought and enclosure
from Saturn Computers). The
SCSI card had drivers on the internet and also Windows comes with ASPI
drivers. The cheapest solution I have seen is over £200 for a
PCMCIA CDR.
 The enclosure
came with two 50-pin Centronics sockets on the back and rather than
waste money on a converter I had an old 50-pin mini D-type socket lying
around which I modified to fit the back of the drive enclosure.
Live! (almost)
Using a Logitech Quickcam PRO USB I have a webcam
which is occasionally online (about 50% of the time).
DJing
The onboard soundcard, sadly, leaves something to be desired. The line-in
socket is right next to the hard disk and therefore when recording direct
to disk the line noise generated by the sound file being written to
disk is audible in the sound file itself. If a quiet patch in the song
is recorded then little cracks and pops can be heard in the playback
of the WAV. That is the hard disk interference. The same is true of
playback of any audio file, the headphone out socket is right next to
the line-in socket (next to the hard disk :).
The only way around this is to use an external A-D converter (or D-A
for playback), which I have yet to acquire. This means the only signal
which is near the laptop is digital and unaffected by noise hopefully.
Marian
USB-One (£139) is a nice blue one. Plus it is another cool
piece of hi-fi equipment with lights and knobs on.
Links
EPBrown Laptops
Click here
to do a Google search for VAIO stuff
Thats it...bye.
last updated 18th May 2001 by jono
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