Comments on: Long term software impressions – Sony VAIO P

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:30:33 +0000

I’d like to make a correction to some above comments. 128 gigabytes (GB) is equal to about 119.2 gibibytes (GiB). 128 gibibytes(GiB) is equal to about 137 gigabytes (GB). Hence the old 137 GB ATA hard drive limit, it was actually a 128 GiB limit! 128 GiB is addressable by a weird 37 bits (2^37 is 137,438,953,472). 137,438,953,472 bytes = 128 GiB ≈ 137.4 GB

1024*1024*1024 bytes = 1 GiB
1000*1000*1000 bytes = 1 GB

Not the other way around DavidC1, Ben had it right!

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 04:17:27 +0000

Sorry Tony, I didn’t check the sleep time before I put Windows 7 on it, and it doesn’t look like Windows 7 has sleep support on the VAIO P at the moment. I would assume they will have it when Windows 7 is finalized though.

By: Toby

Toby — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:53:22 +0000

By: DavidC1

DavidC1 — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:15:10 +0000

Posted too fast and missed some points.

1. There are enough flash chips to make it 128 Gigabytes.
2. But controller space is necessary for performance/reliability.
3. In the HD world, they sell as Gibibytes but your computer shows as Gigabytes and they aren’t gonna change the naming now, so the amount of space reserved for controller is generally equal to the difference between Gibibytes and Gigabytes.

By: DavidC1

DavidC1 — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:10:03 +0000

No the other way around. 128 Gibibytes is equal to 119 Gigabytes. I don’t know how it works in rotating platter HDDs, but in SSDs, the difference is controller dedicated space. So there ARE really 128 Gigabytes, you can’t see them.

By: TonyJ

TonyJ — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:22:17 +0000

Hi – I used to own a Raon Everun, and what I loved about that was that it would stay in sleep mode for what seemed like days, which meant I never shut it down or hibernated it, and it was there for me the moment I wanted it, in just a few seconds. So a wake-from-sleep time of two seconds sounds fantastic – but have any idea how long it will stay in sleep more for?

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:09:36 +0000

I’ll see if I can make that happen, but just for you, ok? : )

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:51:05 +0000

Thanks for pointing this out David, I’m a bit confused though.

You are saying that the 128GB capacity as rated by Sony is accurate, but that is a number expressed in Gigabytes, while the same capacity, expressed in Gibibytes is equal to 119. Doesn’t that mean that the extra 9GB is not extra at all, but instead just a perceived difference from the use of measuring the same capacity in two different ways?

By: Toby

Toby — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:43:37 +0000

Many thanks Ben for your excellent continuing review of the P. I am looking forward to reading the final installment.
Any chance before you send it back you can try out Windows 7?

By: DavidC1

DavidC1 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:44:31 +0000

“As I mentioned, the VAIO P has a zippy 128GB SSD for storage. However, out of the box my VAIO P only had 92GB available and only displays as having a maximum of 119GB. This is after Dynamism installed an awesomely bloatware-free image of Vista. So where is the extra 9GB of space that seem to be missing from my drive?”

The difference of 9GB is the difference between Gigabytes(1024x1024x1024) and Gibibytes(1000x1000x1000). All hard drives have this difference.

In SSDs though, it serves a specific feature. The non-accessible portion of the drive(9GB in this case) is what the SSD controller needs for wear levelling and performance functions. If the drive has 0 space for this, by the time the drive is full capacity, performance of the drive will be EXTREMELY LOW.

By: JC

JC — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:29:47 +0000

The amount of free memory during machine idle is an easily misinterpreted metric. It’s generally to the operating system’s advantage to keep things in memory for as long as possible. If the user needed it at one point, it may need it again. Having it already in memory is faster than going out to disk to retrieve it. (e.g., shared library and such.)

If you’re not using the computer, why do you care how much memory is in use? If when you use the computer again, what the OS needed to load in is already in memory, that’s a win. If, despite all the stuff that’s in memory, it still has to load yet more, that’s a problem.

If you’re going to go there, it makes more sense to see how much memory utilization increases when you actually start using an application. Likewise, you want to see how much data the operating system swaps in and out of memory. If the OS is swapping a lot, then you clearly don’t have enough memory for what you’re doing. Otherwise, things are likely fine.

In other word, low memory utilization when idle is not necessarily the sign of a lean operating system. This may just mean that it needs to load big chunks of itself into memory whenever you start an application. High memory utilization when idle is not necessarily the sign of a fat operating system. The OS may just be preloading objects that it knows it will need once the user starts doing something. (Of course, how much work it’s doing while it’s supposedly idle will factor into all of this too.)

By: Ben Lang

Ben Lang — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:15:38 +0000

New article: Long term software impressions – Sony VAIO P http://cli.gs/SAEpHE