sony vaio vgn-p530ch doesnt run second life

Hello there second lifers! here with a review of the Sony VGN-P530CH, my latest little netbook.

First of all let me say, I love this computer. It is tiny, has a very high resolution screen, and has a nice, big keyboard. I bought it because my Acer Aspire one had just a bit less screen resolution than I could use for work purposes (coding in flash requires I have quite a few windows and inspectors available onscreen so 1024x768 just wasnt cutting it.

Its the smallest full fledged laptop I have ever seen, weighing in at 1.4 pounds and literally fitting easily in my pants pocket (I wear loose pants with large pockets, not fitting jeans or anything) and it also fits easily in my jacket inside pocket.

So for work, checking emails, programming flash, java, html, and doing facebook/social network stuff, blogging, and doing web graphics its more than adequate. I wish it was running XP but I fully plan on upgrading to windows 7 which according to reviews is much faster than vista.

Now the bad news. SL WONT RUN on it! It does run sluggish on my acer aspire, but it runs, and I have done public meetings and voice meetings on the aspire one without any problems as long as im not panning around that much and people in the room are nice enough to keep their attachments in check. I had hoped to see Second Life on this machine, but alas it has a intel "500" chip set and SL doesnt support anything below a 945 chipset for intel. What a drag.

In my last code handyman blog, I mentioned that SL is irrelevant for most people. I can run facebook, ning, blogger, google, digg, wikipedia, webmail, adobe CS3 and the big pig AKA windows vista on this sub $1000 net book, but not SL. Were there ways of decoupling friends, group chat, voice chat, and the 3d rendering options I probably could still go in world, attend a concert, mabey see people as 2d avatars or get screenshots once in a while rather than a full 3d reprsentation and thus still be able to participate in SL on my netbook. I can leave things like building and viewing huge particle displays to my desktop happily, but If I need to go to a virtual meeting for work in SL, Id happily forgo the live 3d rendering just to participate.

Anyway, I still recommend the vaio P if you find the acer aspire too low resolution and want something far more powerful than an iphone because hey, typing an internet address into an iphone SUCKS!

I think the vaio P (to my chagrin) has a new one already out in Japan that has a much faster processor and SSD hard drive instead of the disk on this one, but it still appears to be the intel 500 graphics so no soap on this for the year. But, it makes this a bit easier on me with Sony's 6 month no interest plan, so I can pay it off over that time in manageable chunks, and then in 8 months or so sell this one to a less "power user" and move on to the latest and greatest. I am so happy to live in a time when cutting edge technology like this is actually affordable, and not $3700 like the old "pocket vaio" one of my staff got as a bonus back in 2003!

Thanks for reading! See you in world, but not on my Sony VGN-P530CH ;)