Hardware, services
The core of the system is a 1.2 GHz Intel Core Solo U1400 ULV processor, the abbreviation stands for Ultra Low Voltage, so the CPU doesn’t eat much electrical energy; the system bus has a speed of 533 MHz, L2 cache size is 2 MB. There is 1 GB of DDR400 memory; the GMA950 video controller can have maximum 128 Mb of this. The hard disk has a capacity of 40 GB, the user can have 30 GB of this by default, and the rest is a separate system backup partition, so if there’s trouble we can restore a factory default XP anytime. The hard disk has many security functions, for example it automatically parks the read-write head if it senses an acceleration that is more than allowed.
The Ethernet port supports 10/100 Mbps transfer speeds, the WiFi unit has great reception quality and supports 802.11a/b/g standards. Bluetooth is of version 2.0 (+EDR) and there is no infra port on the little VAIO. With the help of the built-in modem we can use mobile internet, but this service is available only on the American Cingular network, so I couldn’t test it. It’s no big loss, as there’s no HSDPA, the modem supports only EDGE transfers.
The operating system is Windows XP Professional with SP2. We get quite a lot of software pre-installed, Office 2003 and Pen Plus are full version applications; Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Works 8.5 can be used for 60 days, while TrendMicro Anti-Spyware and SmartDraw Suite Edition are 30-day trial versions. VAIO Touch Launcher is of course full version software.
VAIO Touch Launcher
Speed was just as I expected, the CPU that counts as quite fast amongst UMPCs and the 1 GB of RAM were enough to run basic applications without any problems. Thanks to the USB ports and the VGA output we can connect a monitor, a mouse and a keyboard to the machine, so we can use it as a full value computer when on the docking station. The operating system start up rather fast, even though there are more than 60 entries in the task manager after boot, which is about triple the amount as in a usual Windows XP.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
