All quiet on the western front. [Bzzy]

[digitaldiscipline]

... and as I typed that, the world blew up.

Be that as it may, this remix of Heaven's Earth rocks my box/socks/bagels and lox.

In any case, last night was my first foray into the official BzzAgent action. Along with Angelsil & El Uno, we hit the "snob mall" (International Plaza) in search of the Sony Store. Fortunately, Angel knew right where it was, so the mutual exposure of yuppies::me was kept to a relative minimum. Heh.

I had every intention of doing a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine with Angel (since she is a card carrying Sony Whore, and proud of it, whereas I don't trust any pc that doesn't have at least some of my skin and blood involved in its genesis). However, the tech guy seemed to have eyes only for me (why, I wonder?). I dunno if it was giving Sil the wrong impression, but I was keenly aware of the fact that it was "guy talking to guy" rather than "guy talking to everyone" most of the time.

After a rather surprising bit of stand-around waiting for our Vaio expert to shepherd us among the laptops, it was refreshing to see that, despite the Apple-ness of the store, they're not fundamentally bad hunks of equipment (shiny points were earned for both carbon-fiber construction and the extreme niftiness of a 1ghz windows-based ultra-portable the size of a thick paperback... as well as the gunmetal grey microfiber uniform shirts the employees get).

Our presenter knew his patter, and quickly pointed out the differences between the various models in their lineup despite a completely nonlinear and non-intuitive naming convention for their devices. I blame AMD & Intel for starting this idiocy with their processor ratings scheme after moving beyond the Pentium III generation of hardware (at least carmakers have a modicum of logic to theirs - LS430 = "luxury sedan, 4.3 liter engine" and so forth).

He also cleared up a misconception on my part, gleaned from reading their promotional material too quickly (you get trade-in value towards a new laptop by bringing them your old laptop, not any old PC... so my nascent scheme to find something more useful to do with the P3-800 in my office foundered on the rocks of reality); he also said that they're looking to do something similar with camcorders (already launched on the sonystyle web site, eventually to trickle down to their B&M locations).

Bob and I then talked about HDTV while Angel perused digital cameras after they'd made a purchase decision.

In a frightening bit of confluence, I had mentioned David Hasselhoff's music videos (this will be inflicted on them tomorrow at Casa Critus *muahahaha*) as we made our way in from the parking lot, and lo and behold, who was on all the big-screen tv's when we walk in, than the Hoff hizzownself, as Adam Sandler's boss in "Click," (which, naturally, I had to check out (it was in the promo loop for Blu-Ray) because of the gratuitous slo-mo shot of a delightfully stacked blonde jogging).

On the whole, I still don't see myself as a Vaio owner, but, as I told the Sony folks, this was about as close as I've come to wanting one since seeing the first Dell XPS; I don't want a toy. If I get a laptop, it'll be as a desktop replacement, and that's still a tall order as far as specs are concerned (not RAM/CPU these days, but until there's a TB of storage in one of them, I don't see myself making the jump, because I have too much crap stored on my main rig for easy migration... also, I don't care for the difficulty in upgrade path a laptop represents; I'd much rather have the ability to yank and replace devices as finances warrant, rather than dropping a used-Miata sized chunk of change on something I can only do minimal tweaking to down the road).

Comments

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

I've always admired the sony vaios, not so much for their cutting edge technical prowess or sheer computing power (I still have to leave that to some like say, Alienware), but in terms of bringing together a nice, fairly powerful package in a really nice looking unit, Sony pretty much wins.

On the downside, you *do* pay for it through the nose on those units. That coupled with the fact that you really can't upgrade notebooks (for the most part, unless you really know what you're doing) makes a notebook a tougher sell for me. At least the prices dropping like a rock makes getting a cheap $600 Dell justifiable.

As for you not trusting anything that doesn't have your input in it's genesis, I laugh. Loudly. Gratuitously. You seem to forget how many weekends were spent rebuilding that box that you kept shuffling back on forth from Coudersport, the smoking PSU and a number of failed/destroyed RMA products that you've had to send it.

If you like the 1GB ultraportable, go check out the QQQ.

Trade in: Go check and see what requirements they have in terms of components and functionality. I'm sure you could pick up a 486 laptop on ebay for little more than the cost of shipping if the trade value is worth it.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Earning the ability to build quality equipment by nuking a lot of failed experiments is the only way, mon frere. Heh. And how much of that was due to a bad disk image, anyway?

Their req's are a minimum of 1ghz cpu, so you can't just get $100 for a POS; that was included in the spiel. I had that thought myself.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Darn. I was going to ask just that question, as I want to upgrade my old Vaio laptop, but I IIRC, it's down in the 0.5 GHz range.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

They may be more liberal with that policy if it's old Sony equipment; I'd recommend checking the sonystyle.com site for the particulars (once the word came down that it wasn't extded to old desktops, my attention wasn't as keen, since that's all i have).

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Looks like maybe $50. Not really worth it since it still works, albeit not so well any more, and it's only a 333 MHz apparently, but a good wipe and load might help.

[megiddo-lj.livejournal.com]

I've been using Sony PCs exclusively for 5 years. I've never had a major problem with one. Ever. I'm willing to pay a little more for reliability and, yeah, they look damn cool. I <3 my latop. No, it wasn't the cheapest out there, but for the portability and power it wasn't vastly overpriced.

Basically if it's an electronic that Sony makes, we own a Sony. The only item I think they lose ground on is the mp3 players. Granted, mine's 18 months old now but the software SUCKS and the interface is cludgy. Haven't given the newer ones a real spin.

Rafe - I think he was talking mostly to you because he knew I already HAD a Vaio laptop. It was kinda eerie. He remembered my name and the car I drive. Bob was starting to think something funny was going on.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

That level of recognition is, however, a sign of outstanding customer service. That's the sort of thing that we encourage and recognize as being Good around here. Framed like that, it does make sense.

Maybe he thought you were trying to get me to drink the Kool Aid of true Sony Whoredom (I have a reciever & speakers by them, but that's all). :-)

[megiddo-lj.livejournal.com]

ONE OF US!

ONE OF US!

(When we bought my laptop, he pretty much talked directly to me since I was the one making the decision)

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

Umm, perhaps that just means that Sil goes into that store way too often. Kinda like me and Best Buy (or Fry's Electronics now) or even Burger King (Wegmans before).

[theonebob.livejournal.com]

We've only been there 3 times! (Of course, 2 of the 3 times we left with merchandise.) Thank the Lords of Kobol that the store is in an enclosed mall. Sil hates malls, so it's probably a deterrant.

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about Sonys. When I lived in Buffalo, it was the same way -- Sony all the way. I think Baal and I once counted 18 Sony emblems in the family room alone.

But to be honest, I don't think Sony is cutting edge in electronics anymore (except perhaps the Trinitron XBR series and the Playstation). My Pioneer receiver far outperforms anything Sony even makes (even the ES series). Speakers? Sony isn't even close.

But yeah, the Sony Vaio Laptops are the shiznat. In terms of sheer looks, the only thing that comes close are some of the limited ones (the Acer Ferrari comes to mind), but Sony Vaios are consistently sharp looking. Period.

[megiddo-lj.livejournal.com]

We have the Sony Dream surround system. For our tiny living room it works. I'm not an audiophile so I can't rate their performance against the competition.

Sony needs to make Aquarium Lights imo.