Re: tlug: Sony VAIO & apm

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

I've had an interesting morning.  I couldn't find my recovery CD
for the VAIO, so I called up Customer Support.  The woman I spoke
with first stopped me in my tracks when I told her I had
installed Linux.  Unfortunately, she said, they only support
Windows 95, Windows 98 and NT on the VAIO.  No Unix support.  I
suggested that a partition on the hard disk generated by a
standalone utility that was supplied to them by Phoenix with the
BIOS was independent of the operating system, but she wouldn't
wear it.  I proposed that Sony was refusing to provide service
for one of their products.  She said yes, that was about the size
of it.  I hung up.

I called back again after I'd cooled off a bit, and spoke with
another rep.  I suggested that, since other companies made the
PHDISK.EXE utility available for the BIOS installed in their
machines, Sony might consider doing the same.  I kept him on the
line long enough for him to make himself useful, but ... he
didn't.  He did say that he would make a note of my suggestion
that things on the recovery CD that CAN be thrown open without
fear of legal action should be mounted to the Web.  And that was
the end of my second conversation with the Sony customer service
department.

So it seems that if you lose your recovery CD, Sony no longer
wants to know about you, or your problems.  This raises feelings
in me that I can only safely express in the confines of a
soundproof box (or on the Advocacy channel).

Happily, I had another rummage through my boxes, and found the
CD.  I've located PHDISK.EXE, used it to create a partition on
the hard disk from a DOS boot floppy, and confirmed that
hibernation now works.  Hurray!

Almost.  I left the machine running when I went out for lunch,
and on my return I found that a timed hibernation had (as
sometimes happened in the past) left the machine powered up (if
the LED is to be believed) but with the screen off and the HDD
spindled down -- and locked solid as an iceberg.  Nothing in my
BIOS settings was configured to power down the screen or the
disk, so I guess that's what a botched hibernation attempt looks
like.

There is a manual hibernation key on the VAIO, which now seems to
work.  I've tried saving and restoring by hand a few times, and
it hasn't locked up (yet).  We'll see how things go from here.
But I think we don't allow timed hibernation anymore.  Once
burned twice shy.

So (from a purely technical perspective, you understand) the VAIO
PCG-731 seems to be a pretty dubious piece of kit.  Nice logo,
though.  Really nice logo.

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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