Reply 18540 of 27559, by ragefury32
So yeah, received an interesting new toy - a Sony Vaio PCG-SR9G/K (it’s the JDM version of the PCG-SR31k). The machine was listed as a flog on Buyee Japan and the bid ended at around 20 USD. Combine that with the usual fees and shipping (Fedex international and freakishly cheap), it was surprisingly affordable and arrived at my home less than a week from end-of-auction.
To be honest, I was expecting a different machine (PCG-SR9K with the Neomagic NM2380), but the fact that it’s an SR9GK with the SavageIX does make it interesting, since it’s very similar to the SR27k that I used to have. The fact that I am planning to run Windows 98SE on it instead of Windows 2000/XP also made its 256MB RAM ceiling rather irrelevant. I do have an SR9k parts machine heading my way from Japan, so we might get that Neomagic overview later on...
I also ran into roughly the opposite of most experiences with old DOS capable laptops - the audio (Yamaha YMF754) works in DOS but not in Windows - I can’t find any drivers on Sony’s support site, and even if I do, I don’t see any drivers for this machine since it was shipped to run WinMe or 2K - I'll have to hunt down the drivers for it by raiding the recovery disks for similar machines on archive.org. And to be honest, I really don’t see the hype regarding the YMF...my ESS Solo sounds pretty much like it, and the tinny tiny speaker doesn’t help whatsoever.
A fair comparison would be between my Thinkpad 240 (Mendocino 300/Neomagic 128XD/ESS Solo-1/440ZX) versus the SR9GK (Coppermine 600M/SavageIX/YMF754/440ZX-M)...but that’s a separate thread.