Quick Start Ep 1: The Slowest VAIO Ever
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- čas přidán 12. 05. 2024
- Get hype: I'm finally doing an actual series! There will be an Ep 2! I promise this time! Computers!
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00:00 Intro
02:38 The Problem
07:20 Sony's Crimes
12:02 An Industry In Crisis
14:20 Sony's Solution
18:18 The Breakdown
23:24 What Sony Bought
26:09 The Series In Summary
28:21 The Vaio In Summary
23:40 Wrapup
34:30 Outro - Věda a technologie
Well if this first episode is anything to go by then this is probably my most-anticipated YT series at the moment, ha
Psyched to learn what breeds of dead-end technological nonsense you uncover, what a wonderfully niche rabbit hole.
Greetings LGR 🫡
yo when is that pc drive bay urinal video coming out? the bottom of this barrel ain't gonna scrape itself.
100% agreed, I watched this one breathlessly
Yo LGR
I can hear Clint getting pumped and exclaiming 'Neat!'
That Amogus Amiga shirt hits me off guard every time
as a tech nerd who plays Among Us the moment I saw the shirt I laughed out loud and I immediately began looking if someone else noticed the shirt and sure enough, someone else did. I'm wondering if you can buy this somewhere
Fuck i watch all the whole video and i realized right now.
same hahaha
AMONG US!!!!!
It’s the first time I think I see it but immediately as I caught it I wanted it
The Tandy 1100FD laptop with MS-DOS, the DeskMate graphical user interface, a word processor, and a 90,000-word spelling checker dictionary built into ROM, which boots up in 2.3 seconds, is a much more usable product -- and it was introduced in 1989!
Hard agree!
@@CathodeRayDudeI got a windows 10 tablet with an emmc and after 1 year of use it just stopped working usually and probably boots slower than that
@@he8535 Sounds like the curse of eMMC indeed.
Cheap flash memory, limited controller, no way to fix it so it slows down and the product dies. Almost as if planned!
While with an actual SSD, small or not, they can be fixed.
If only those low end laptops could boot DOS, they would be so much more usable !
@@he8535 Emmc just should not be used with Windows ... it kills them with all unnecessary write operations. Additional bloatware make things even worse.
This man is an academic in a field no one asked for and I love it.
You know that journalist is an actual profession? A honorable and established profession? You know that, don't you?
Well, at least they (journalists) know the definition of the words they use. At least the good ones even look them up, if they do not know.
Oh and I know that you meant your comment as a praise, in high regard, but an "academic in a field no one asked for" isn't anything one should say to strangers. Think again about it and what it means ... there is not much positive behind that.
@@dieSpinnt Journalist is not a profession, in this time and age is more like insult 😁
An academic would upload stuff that was paced better and wouldn't need rewinding in order to be understood, a journalist would give a perspective of what the subject is - who used vaios and who used vista, and yes, if you call this guy a journalist, there is insult around somewhere.
To say "I hate flimsy cd bays" the way he said it means he is addressing the 30 nerds plus maybe 100 under 6 year olds in Europe who actually had issues with that, everyone else just uses two hands, either on the bay or tilting the laptop so the bay rests on the table or just a slight sideways motion - i guess there is a number of ways. So again, not a journalist.
Im glad that you got to see, firsthand, that it was vendor-installed bloatware that killed Vista
I am almost sure SQL server were prerequisite for some of the installed bloatware, not a deliberate install. Which actually makes things even worse.
SQLite - Serious Enterprise edition. :-D
Its funny i had no idea what sql was and now that I know what SQL is as an engineer I still dont know what it was doing on my vista laptop as a kid.
And I actually thought he just had mistaken that for SQL Server Compact, which for the most part is an embedded SQL database like SQLite, not a whole database server. If *I* am not mistaken, at least it seems Sony only shipped the management programs for SQL Server.
They included like a full SQL Suite. Like I saw the configuration as well. I kinda wish Microsoft was more lax with their SQL Server and wasn't so expensive.
I seem to recall that a few games even required SQL Server. SimCity 3000, I think, was one of 'em.
I just can't get enough of the weird dead ends, long dead standards, and just wild reaches you cover on this channel. There are so many times I've watched something here and thought, "this is so clunky, bizarre, and esoteric. I wish this was how everything worked".
Failure and obscurity are essential components to a magical journey full of wonders, madness, and heartbreak.
7:23 That Norton Firewall was worse than nothing! Around that time I was telling people to disable Norton Internet Security nearly daily whenever they described some subtle problem with some random website. I think it was disabling cross site scripting, which is actually a good idea, but it just wasn't viable at that time and the program gave little to no feedback about what was going on when it blocked things. Norton also turned every Core2 into a 386. Everyone used to joke about the malware being less of an intrusion.
Stuff like that only found malware the day after that it's expired. . . 😮
No lie, during the Vista era we saw multiple minute boot times and even 3-5 minute first boots as the OEMs pit so much bloatware on the PC. I worked at Best Buy in the corporate Computer team and was working to get rid of that bloatware and make new PC ownership better. It was so awful back then. The OEMs made roughly $30-50 per PC from all that stuff.
I rolled back to XP for a few people. I refused to put Vista on my PC and stayed with XP.
jesus i remember having vista as a kid and, quite literally, booting my computer when i woke up and not even bothering to use it for like 15-20 minutes until it had not only booted, but that all the apps and shit had loaded. it truly was awful. computers have come so far.
Why not just boot intoa small version of Linux so you can have web browser, emulators, and editors.
Damn that sucks, but luckily Microsoft fixed all the problems... when 7 was released
What's worse there was no option to pay for clean OS. I mean a sizeable amount of customers would pay for this back then
But I think if someone did this, customers immedately will switch to another brand which push the same crap on computers but not saying about that...
The lower battery life was probably also related to the low cost. Linux didn't work properly with a lot of power control stuff at that time, mostly due to missing drivers, especially on laptops.
Linux still suffers with battery life issues. It's less of a resource hog, but I have had it kill a battery at least 20% faster than Windows because Windows has better power management despite being bloated. There are some tweaks you can do, but it really could be better. I haven't used a direct OEM Linux machine (like PopOS! on a System76 system), so it could be better when someone puts in the work.
I also have a Pinebook Pro, which is ARM based, and that's not even in the ball park for battery life with my M1 Macbook. They have a lot of hardware differences, so I know the Pinebook isn't even remotely as optimized, so it also runs hotter and slower.
@@sbrazenor2 Right now it heavily depends on the hardware. On modern Lenovo ThinkPads Linux tends to have better battery life without extra tweaking, if all the software you use supports hardware acceleration properly.
But on the laptops of some other brands, or on laptops with dedicated GPUs it still may be quite bad.
@@vcprocles I had it on a Lenovo laptop, but it was a super-cheap Ideapad that was like $100 student laptop with eMMC storage. It was likely just a rebranded Chinesium craptop that was barely a computer at a budget. 🤣
It STILL has issues today with power states
@@vileCR999 TBH that's mainly due to the depreciation of the old sleep states
on modern amd machines just making sure that pstates are working gives a massive battery improvement(the kernel stuff is still kinda in beta so needs to be manually configured on most machines)
My mothers old VAIO laptop from ~2011 had a "WEB" button that would boot the system into a tiny Linux distro with a woefully outdated web browser and maybe a couple utilities. I think it got used a few times purely by accident of hitting the button. I'm super glad you're doing a series on this super weird little sector of PC stuff from that time. It's one of those things anyone there probably saw, but completely forgot about and dismissed, I know I did!
tysm both for the comment and the description of the machine - I'm gonna go see if I can find one of those now and find out what it runs!
@@CathodeRayDude it runs splashtop, i also have the exe install files
(today it's useless, it has just an outdated browser and a basic file manager)
I had something similar on my old laptop at first i thought it could have been fun since i thought windows was slowing me down. but then i found out it didn't support flash or java so it was pointless.
Okay, now I want to know how flexible the Vaio solution is... can you replace the root filesystem and boot a more complete distro? A newer kernel?
@James Gibson yes and you will find instructions on old forums. I spent days futzing with this to have a physical boot into Linux button 😂. Running a distro off ntfs wasn't ideal, so you'd chain boot into your Linux partition from it. Or chroot, if you were so inclined.
21:25 Fun fact: Almost every file you can see in 21:25 is going to be a symlimk to that busybox. That's how it works: busybox itself is multiple UNIX(or maybe I should say POSIX) utilities shoved into one program, and decides what to launch by looking at the filename.
A while ago I was in the uneviable position of explaining why Bash having a POSIX-compliant mode makes it Bash a POSIX-compliant shell. The other person's main argument was that they worked differently and were different programs. When I brought BusyBox as an example of one program doing many things, the person tried to tell me that BusyBox, despite it literally being structured as one program that does many things, is actually multiple programs. I pretty much gave up after that because it was clear that continuing would lead nowhere.
that must be why a lot of them are just a couple bytes
@@markusTegelane Though now I look at it, file sizes are kind of strange. Symlinks are normally stored at filesystem level, and afaik the reported size is the same as the original one.
I thought maybe it's shell script wrapper, but the size is too small for that too. And obviously it makes no sense that those are original executable, since not only you can't fit bare x86 instructions to do the job, but also you would need ELF headers at very minimum to be executable.
So I'm pretty sure it's symlink, but it is weird.
@@yjk_ch I've seen symlinks stored as text files, on a remote file system. But on the system using them, they appear as normal symlinks. This static file system might be using this mode to make it easy to prep the files that will be combined into the image, ... or maybe the utility he used to extract the files didn't mark the symlink files as such, so you see the underlying actual content which is just a file name.
Can confirm they were all this slow out of the box. Worked at Circuit City from 2003-2006. We used to offer a service to "setup" your new computer which meant we would do the first boot which was painfully long. Then we would go ahead and add some more bloatware to your machine.
They were already dead, how could you add more bs adware. 💀
RIP Circuit City
@@benji-menji How DID they even MANAGE to get adware INSTALLED
Sets were leaned out with kite frames & printed wood grain; drawers were cardboard box front & did not open; if USER throws a massive item on it like a paper clip, severe damage effects happened; 😂 Microsoft opined that they didn't know desktop stability was an issue. . .
The AV mode isn't a terrible idea, given the tiny form factor of the laptop. Dedicated portable DVD players (like the ones sold by Sony) were a pretty popular travel accessory. If you're seated in a cramped train, for example, popping open your DVD-sized laptop and pressing one button to watch your DVD could be a pretty appealing feature.
Good in theory. It would've been especially great if it wasn't so pokey and feature-limited, and could get like, at least 50% more battery life, rather than some less. But yeah a neat feature, poorly implemented. But yeah definitely integrating the portable DVD player with a laptop, which is smart.
Dell did a dedicated DVD player OS as well. I can confirm it was much more power efficient than playing in windows. It was a good feature and I did enjoy it.
Yea a little bit underwhelming but it could be handy back in the 2000s.
It seems to have a bit more value as a CD player when on a train or plane, such as for reading a book to. Waiting a couple minutes for a movie on a long trip isn't the end of the world, but having to read in silence for 2-5 minutes sucks worse.
It'd be funny if it still only lasted a couple hours on the battery while in CD mode. Given Linux's lack of power control at the time
I may have used AV Mode like three times the entire time I used that as my main laptop. Once was to test a DVD I had created in DVD Lab Pro, and it didn't even play it correctly. Whether that was a bug in the DVD player library, or the authoring tool, I don't know. Neither were particularly reliable. But the disc worked fine elsewhere, so...
Anyway, I was hoping for some kind of firmware thing that used a minimum of hardware to keep the energy usage closer to dedicated playback devices than a laptop. That's not what you get, though.
33:13 That Playstation media bar thing was actually an aesthetic Sony used a lot. I distinctly remember a lot of their DVD and Blu-ray players had similar UIs for whatever reason.
And TVs! My parents had a Bravia with the same "Home" Menu
@@BlackDroid003 i have a sony bravia! and yep, same menu!
Dont forget the PSX, I mean the DVR PSX not the Playstation 1... Was a DVR/MediaCenter with a playstation 2 shoved in it, It's where the XMB was born and sadly never came to the west.
@@RBRat3 I always wondered if the XMB ("Cross Media Bar") was itself a rip on the slightly older XBMC ( XBox Media Center) project..
Given that I have no proof but just faulty memory about how old each was, its probably not, but still seemingly ironic
I've got an very early Sony "smart" TV that uses the PlayStation Media bar for it's UI. Looks lovely but is super slow!
whenever im seeing a crd video about computers i think of that video where they say "making a video about a computer is hard, they are all boring, connect them, turn them on, explore the os, thats it, nothing else", so seeing them enjoy so much this series has hyped me up ngl
Yeah see that's the thing, I work hard to find the few computers that actually get me excited, and then I know it's going to be a good video
@@CathodeRayDude maybe see what happens if you hacktosh it
@@CathodeRayDudeI stopped watching retro computing channels years ago because of this exact reason! It's always the same boring crap (and no offense to some big names, but they don't make it any better by always demoing the exact same games over and over again...) but I think this channel might have gotten my interest!
This laptop's main bottleneck is the TINY little HDD that is like 1.5" and insanely slow. I've always wondered if there was a way to replace it with a tiny SSD
You can, I think it was a (ZIF?) drive, which you can adapt to a CF card I think.
I have an Atom-netbook that originalöy had a hdd inside... since i was used to that keyboard so much (I used it in school from about 2010 to 2012 since my handwriting was so bad i could barely read it myself) i also used that thing when I got back to school in 2018... Anyway it has a perfectly clean XP and LibreOffice installed on a 128gig ssd... that rhing boots on like 5 seconds
I am one hundred percent invested in this because this era of computing is what made me go from a passive user to a curious teen seeking alternatives… which then became my career.
Personally, I think the worst band-aid for the slow boot problem was Optane.
As an SSD, it was fast, but the problem was that it was never available in large enough sizes to be useful as anything other than cache.
It became an excuse for laptop manufacturers to keep selling laptops with spinning-rust hard drives well into the late 2010s, advertising “24GB of memory” which was actually 8GB of RAM and 16GB of Optane.
Optane is amazing for other things. Life finds a way.
The old bait and switch
Nah, optane was a hardware solution to ram more code in and out faster, Microsoft could have produced much better results by writing much more efficient code, without a 10001 libraries needing to be loaded, then shoved off to a virtual ram disk image to make room for more bad code.
Optane was absolutely made available in reasonable SSD sizes, they were just not reasonably priced compared to NAND SSDs. Even being now discontinued, there's no real equivalent in speed. That's not to mention the potential it had as a second tier of RAM... When actually connected to the memory bus like Optane DIMMs. The caching solution consumers were given was a joke compared to what Optane was meant to do.
Hard disagree. I recently downgraded my laptop from a dramless 256 GB ssd to a 100 GB optane drive, for that sweet sweet half a million iops.
You can get some great deals on large optane drives right now because it's now a dead product line and Intel is dumping them.
Randomly found someone link this video on a reddit comment and man I am hooked. The way you tell this story about a thing I had no idea existed 24 hours ago is an absolute joy to listen to.
Old software probably rely on some old server that almost surely doesn't work anymore - thus a good part of the slow boot (not entirely, and yes i don't doubt that it took 2~3min to boot) is caused by it trying to load something (ads, crap, junk) from some sketchy long-dead server. Just like the undefined strings in the sidebar (which, btw, are exactly based on web elements, so that's why it shows JS 'undefined').
It would be interesting to setup a local server and monitor the requests that it shows right after the factory reset install, to comprove this.
Something interesting is that the “psp ui” skin was also used on a lot of Sony’s “smart” blue-ray players. So that was probably just another example of a dvd player type software being shoved onto a laptop.
I had a TV with the XMB interface, a sony kdl-32xbr6 (or 7?, I forget). Somewhat responsive, but not as nice as on a PSP. The TV was similarly specced even, ~233Mhz MIPS processor, but probably stripped down video hardware and also a higher output resolution.
I am HYPE for this new series! I love this kind of wacky, novel engineering.
i've watched every video on your channel and im BEYOND hyped for this series!
The 2000's had such divergent schools of thought on what a computer should be..your channel gives me that same feeling i had as a kid of the endless possibilities of tech
The Sprint thing you mentioned actually hunts at the fact that the computer has a built in cellular modem
Sprint were mainly a landline POTS service back then - flirting in and out of cellular around 2003. They had a long history under various prior names going back to 1899 (not a typo). Pretty sure it will have been a wired modem.
I used to fix a lot of laptops in the mid 2000’s (mostly Toshiba) and out of hundreds of customers I think I met 1 who ever used those buttons. In terms of penny pinching: The functionality required a special partition and if you lacked the right recovery CD (typically $80 to replace) you were boned.
In a LOT of models the recovery CD was something the user had to create themselves when they first got the computer! If the OS got corrupted or the HD died, hope you already made that disk, or, hope u got ten bux X 8.
That it did. ThinkVantage never worked properly on my X220
I have an old Thinkpad with a CD player function and I can't think of why I would ever use that over literally anything else in the same room. I have a dedicated stereo, which sounds better, a TV connected system which sounds better, and a desktop system with much better speakers. I guess if you're on the road and you forgot your Discman and you have nothing else, it's an option.
Can confirm. Had to create the recovery DVDs myself. I threw them away a few years ago, then found another TX laptop on eBay, and have been kicking myself ever since. They are impossible to find in the wild, and "for security," most sellers are dutifully wiping the drives before sending the hardware to you. Especially fun considering all the bespoke buttons and controllers embedded in VAIOs. Good luck finding drivers for those.
"we've got bin, etc... etcetera!"
It's funny how I know you have no kids, and yet you are such a dad, gravis.
WHAT
Fresh topic. Always a pleasure to see what you create. As a PC tech myself, if your PC doesn't fully boot in one minute -something needs a replacement, upgrade, or the o/s needs cleaning.
In 2011 I had an Asus G51 with Express Gate. There was a project by a hobbyist that replaced the EG partition with GRUB and whatever Linux distribution you wanted. It was really cool to have a dedicated button to boot into Ubuntu aside from the power button for windows. Didn't really solve the slow booting issue (by then I was using Win7) but being able to repurpose the button was very convenient at least.
Nice i have a G50VT the predecessor, came with expressgate. Never used it! Mine had the green OLED display on the left side above the keyboard that eventually burns out but someone developed a mod to make it real useful.
I feel that a good portion of users never even thought about the slow boot problem, but the engineers making those computers sure as shit did. The kind of person who opens their laptop in a hotel lobby to check email won't care, but if your job to make and test that laptop hundreds of times, it's a nightmare. The Disproportionate care that went into this issue feels like it was it was a solution for the producer end that was then sold to consumers rather than something made answering market demands.
I think people were just conditioned to accept slow, underperforming computers, and that waiting and random error messages were just a normal thing. :p But yknow, why refine anything, just move on to the next new thing before anything has time to develop, and make people buy something else and promise it'll be better.
@@Aeduo Yet that time a Sony PSP can just boot up in about 10 seconds and be ready to play a UMD disc or play media on it. So I would think Sony PC engineers did look at what Sony console engineers did with the PS3 and PSP and thought the boot time for Vista were unacceptable yet didn't have the resources to really make a PC laptop as fast as handheld gaming system.
@@Psy500 yeah, they could've probably made something good but just had to settle licensing some slap dash junk. I remember windvd being junk too. Nowadays they could just use something like openelec but there was nothing like that and Sony probably wouldn't fund an open project which could benefit a competitor. Nowadays Sony do have some code in the kernel but it's mostly for the sake of interoperability with their own products so it's a direct benefit to Sony.
Yeah people absolutely were conditioned to accept computers being slow on boot, for a relative degree of slowness. What MS did with Vista was basically to rip the scab off by forcing hardware vendors to ship stuff that wasn't complete garbage at a time when they'd built up huge unsold stocks of garbage, to the point that they begged MS to hold off releasing Vista for a year just so they'd have all their built-up stock sold by that point and could plan ahead with better hardware. MS said "lol no" and so we ended up with the Vista-capable/Vista-ready debacle.
To be fair, MS' fault in this lies more with dumping SuperFetch on everyone straight out of the gate regardless of the capability of their hardware to realize its purported load speed increases. If you didn't have at least a mid-tier gaming PC, your Vista experience would've made XP's slowness look appealing (and if you did, then your first year was instead mired in blue screen hell as ATI and nVidia had to rewrite their GPU drivers from scratch to fit within the new driver model), but the hardware manufacturers do share culpability in just how utter dogshit the hardware they were foisting off on unsuspecting customers was.
Oh, and for a fun little diversion into one hardware "solution" of sorts to the Windows slow-boot problem on desktops, LTT has a video on the Gigabyte i-RAM SSD, which came out a good couple of years before Flash SSDs were a Thing. I still have one sitting in a moving box somewhere in my garage, got very little use out of mine (because I bought it used and the backup battery had died so it couldn't hold a filesystem past a reboot).
As someone who spent a lot of time doing email in hotel lobbies, I absolutely hated the long boot up times. You couldn't carry your laptop around in sleep mode, as it could turn itself on in your bag and then the heat would melt the hard drive. Sometimes felt like half my working life was spent just waiting for some damned PC to do something, or wondering what the H it was doing... the only reason anyone tolerated it, was because that was the only way you could have MS Office programs, necessary to be compatible and work with the rest of the world...
no idea why, but "2 motherboards, running the same architechture!" had me absolutely cackling
Same though
I want to see if you can boot a modern Linux off of AV mode cause that'd make it instantly more usable
"Modern" might be pushing it. I'd be willing to bet it's somehow tied a specific (range of?) kernel version(s). But at least a full distro from that era seems like it should be doable.
@@SolarShado Raspbian i think is capable of running on 2.6.x kernels no? Because many SoC kernels are special little shits and stuck in their state decades ago.
@@SianaGearz I'm not sure what kernel version raspbian _started_ with (2.6 probably is a safe bet, as long as that version number was used lol), but I've got an early (either gen 1 or 2) Pi that I recently setup fresh and it's apparently running kernel 5.15
@@SolarShado Mhm maybe i'm thinking of a wrong -ian but like you aren't getting very far with kernel versions on various Amlogic and such SoCs.
@@SianaGearz Oh, yeah, I'll definitely believe that there are embedded systems out there that're very limited in what kernel versions they support; I'm just only familiar with the ras pi. I'm sure there're _plenty_ of ways to make it impossible for the mainline kernel team to maintain compatibility. IIRC avoiding as much of that as possible was a goal of the raspberry pi foundation from the outset, and I think they even had a series of blog posts back in the day about how difficult it was.
I can't wait for more episodes from this series. This is exactly the kind of weird and obscure stuff I'm interested in.
One of the first laptops I was given to play with was a Toshiba Satellite that had a physical switch that you could turn it on as a CD player only (screen didn't even turn on). It continued working even after totally wiping it and installing Linux.
Yeah, I always found those CD audio only buttons interesting.
I strongly suspect that those were leveraging the intrinsic ability of the CDROM itself to play audio; it used to be not-uncommon for nerds to take a spare full size desktop CDROM out to the garage, wire it up to a 12V supply, and use it as a CD player because they had play/pause/next track buttons on the front and audio out. I imagine laptop drives had the same thing on the connector on the back, and Toshiba opted to actually hook it up, and use a little MCU to turn on the power supply without actually powering up the rest of the machine when you hit the button.
I've been following this rabbit hole on co-host, and oh boy I am excited for this series.
The slow booting issue and the complaints about it definitely predated Vista. I remember reading a column about it in one of the consumer tech magazines (I think it was Popular Mechanics or Popular Science) in the very early 2000s where the columnist wanted, paraphrasing, "A PC that turned on as fast as a TV" (and ironically modern Smart TVs take a lot longer to turn on than the analog TVs the writer would have been alluding to).
Most smart TV won't take that long to turn back on if treated it like computers. where you press the power button on a remote to put it to sleep and wake them up again. Though I can see how older smart TVs prior to Android TV or modern webOS stuff takes longer to resume from sleep.
I haven't been this hyped for a series in a long, LONG time. I cannot wait to see where this goes.
You do a great job covering this stuff. I was heavily involved in computer repair back then and you actually go into details... The usual "lolz vista sucked" response usually given just wasn't true. It was a perfectly fine OS that brought us a lot of modern features, but the typical low end hardware of the era wasn't up to the task.
It was absolute torture waiting for computers like that to boot so I could fix someones VPN or a workplace app. Having to restart multiple times was rage inducing, especially when someones laptop was loaded with random internet adware.
exactly volvo...Vista unfairly targeted as the culprit which lead to a reputation of poorly coded boated software...it was too soon for the hardware of the time...2007/8 wasn't yet ready...i ran it for several years...on a low end basic Dell Optiplex and afterwards in a quad core ASUS AMD AM3 based pc...it ran great on the quad...despite the constant criticism of my online friend who continually pressed me to get rid of Vista...it only ended when the old spinner HDD ground to a halt through excess heat and overwork...got the data off the clicking disk and that was that...Win7...like everyone else...
The rant at 27:40 makes me incredibly hyped for this series. Something I've never even heard if before, and I'm excited for you to dig up its corpse.
It was the rant that motivated me to head for the comments section, this is going to be a good one!
Your research and pedantic approach to the history of these subjects always makes me smile. Also I never thought about the term "set-top box" being an oxymoronic bit of legacy terminology but I appreciate you pointing it out. I'll get a chuckle whenever I hear it going forward
So…it basically took the entire Free Bird guitar solo to fully boot up. 😂
it's also possible that the Linux Kernel they are booting in AV mode has little or no cpu Frequency Scaling, so the CPU is just running at full wack when technically it really doesn't need to. Fully fledged Linux Kernels of course do have a CPU Frequency scaler, as does Windows Vista to be fair, but i'm hedging my bets their tiny embedded OS doesn't, or it's non-functional.
Oh, good point!! I hadn't considered that, but particularly for the era I can totally believe that would be an issue.
@@CathodeRayDude I remember battery drain on laptops being a big complaint (among others) on Linux back then as well! they had poor battery life and some models often ran hot, it had a lot to do with the CPU Governor in the kernel which didn't see any real fixes until somewhere around 2010 iirc. given that things age, it's probably Kernel version 2.2.x or 2.4.x, long before those fixes would ever be out. (you can probably find the exact kernel version in those files somewhere)
@@RonLaws If you can find the kernel image itself, I _believe_ the `file` utility can just list its version. It definitely does on the modern Debian box I'm on right now, but that metadata might be dependent on some (disableable) kernel build option?
CPU frequency scaling was barely functional on Linux in 2004 - because why, it was barely functional on hardware as well at that time. By 2007 Intel turned it around massively with their contributions to Linux, but it would have been a little late for this little embeddded Linux.
A default install of XP has CPU frequency scaling disabled which could explain part of why Vista's battery life isn't worse in comparison.
Holy crap, my MAN. I haven't thought about WUBI Loader in at least a decade. Fwiw this is why I sub to your Patreon, you cover some pretty niche stuff that I can identify instantly as something I used heavily for years, like WUBI, but haven't thought about in ages. I don't see many other creators who have such a breadth of interests and things to make content on. Always glad to see a new video from you!
(edit: the summary you gave around the 28min mark as the thesis of this video series was really well said. I hadn't thought of *that* in years, but you don't really see anything novel like that anymore, whereas it was the norm from the 90s through to the early 10s to do everything different and see what stuck to the wall. I'm excited to see more of this series!)
Thank you so much!
Ah, wubi. Yeah that was actually my first experience with linux in 2012. Memories…
WUBI was kinda weird, but redhat linux (not enterprise, just redhat) 7.2 (and probably others, but this is the one i had, from like 2002) could do a similar thing as wubi that long ago. It was less clever in that it couldn't integrate with the windows install/bootloader as far as I could tell, you needed a floppy disk to load the kernel up from, but from there it could boot in to a linux system installed in to a disk image file on the system's main FAT32 partition.
Going back even further to the DOS 6 / Win9x days there was LOADLIN (1994-), which booted Linux from a DOS partition. That wasn't something I used at the time since I preferred to run OS/2 back then, but would be interesting to look at in retrospect.
CRD has an uncanny ability to "hit the spot" when it comes to weird tech you've known of back in the day, and never thought much about, but are actually weirder in hindsight.
This is a truly inspired idea for a series, and it pushed me over the line to finally decide to be a patron. Looking forward to the second installment and beyond, but also glad to belatedly show my appreciation for your prior work.
This is going to be a great series. You have a knack for digging up rancid but fascinating technical dead ends. I really enjoy how you explore the economic technological, and cultural environments that spawn such strange technologies.
Bro I'm not sure if you'll ever read this but the way you present your videos makes you incredibly professional as a content creator. Like, the way you speak, your confidence, even the editing you do, your channel's production value is worth way more than your subs count.
This reminds me of when HP wanted to put WebOS on _everything._ IMO it was still a good idea and it would've been very interesting to see, but then that project became a casualty from the guy that just went "yea let's just kill the PC division because lul, services are the future so no more PCs"
WebOS? You mean a Chromebook 😈
@@runed0s86no. They mean WebOS. WebOS was a Linux distribution created by Palm to replace Palm OS.
It's now used by LG in their Smart TVs.
Looking forward to future episodes in this series. When I read the title I thought it was gonna be boring time, but instead you introduced me to a whole line of products, I never knew ever existed :O
In 2007 SSDs technically existed, but they were 10s of dollars a gig, even a year later a 64GB SSD for the MacBook Air was like $1000. I saw this website before that went over the history of SSDs, and in 2004 there was this 2TB "SSD" that took up an entire rack, and it costed a few million dollars.
I really loved the weird tiny netbooks of this era, I had a tiny convertible laptop/tablet thing that came with a terrible shell OS and took at least two minutes to boot, and quickly became a Linux machine that was much snappier. This stupid thing was probably on my list of potential buys at the time lmao
I still have a strong feeling about Vaios i miss them so much, like the real "weirdness" they used to have under Sony.
Man, your video quality and editing are improving so muxh at eaxh video !
Compiment to the lady for the good work. And to you for all the research you do for each episode.
Your video's are so nice to watch while i'm working.
Its so intresting and the topics are taking me back years !
I like it !
Keep it up, I made sure I smashed the like button !
I feel like this series is gonna be WILD
low power VAIO PDA in 2013 ?
nerdy NOT wild !
You'd be right!
Half the time I honestly have no idea what your content is covering. I mean, you explain it very well, but I have very little experience with computers or camcorders, especially old ones. I had never even heard of Fedora once in my life before I watched a recent livestream of yours. But you’re just so charismatic and entertaining that I can never miss an upload anyway.
Hyped for this series. Your enthusiasm is contagious
I'm pretty interested to see what else comes up in this series! I always thought the "instant on" software on laptops that featured it must have been running some stripped down form of Linux. That was the only thing that made sense cause there's almost no way MS would have allowed OEMs to do that using a form of Win CE or Win PE. Another potential solution to the "slowness" issues for Win 7-8 PCs was the SanDisk ReadyCache SSD and it's associated software. I could tell you some stories about that! How great and how terrible it was at the time!
A lot of the errors you were getting in Vista on that Sony VAIO is due to the lack of RAM and excessive HDD paging. Back in 2008-2010 while working on a US Army installation we had a massive project to upgrade thousands of PCs from XP to Vista. There were a lot of older machines that had 512MB to 1GB of RAM in them which constantly seemed to cause Vista to go haywire and throw all sorts of errors like you were seeing. Upgrading those machines to 2-4 GB of RAM corrected most of those issues.
Personally, I had a Dell Desktop that came with Vista SP2 64bit and I didn't have many issues with it in the nearly 4 years it was my main PC. Of course it also came stock with a Core 2 Quad Q8200 and 4GB (later 8GB) of RAM so it had plenty of horsepower to allow Vista to run properly.
"Theres almost no way MS would have allowed OEMs to do that using Win CE or PE" oh just you wait for some of the more exotic solutions this era saw OEMs come up with
dude i F-ing love your channel. I love nerding out and learning stuff about this old odd tech. thank you for being around in my life time!!!
I know it's not the most impressive feature in the world, but having two "on" buttons dedicated to two different OSes would have been sweet back when I was dual booting. I've wasted a ton of time by accidentally buttoning into the wrong OS in my bootloader so it honestly would have saved me a lot of time as well. I wonder if you could trick the PC into booting a proper linux distro if you packaged it correctly.
it's infuriating to me that there were gobs of machines with multiple power buttons to launch quick start OSes lke this, and none of them were meant to allow this, and so far I haven't seen any clean way to do it. Computers SHOULD have power buttons that can be bound to specific partitions! Ugh!
"Laptops should not be 13 inches"
Absolute giga-ultra-mega-super W take
This is outstanding and i cannot wait for the rest of the series!
Great video! This bring memories of one Dell Latitude laptop model that had that Instant-thingy function around 2009 or 2010. I never attempted using it, but the promise was to open a small environment that would allow you to check your Outlook mail and calendar.
There were PowerPC G4 Mac minis for a little bit, and they make for great transitional machines. You can get OS9 running with some effort.
You produce very compelling second monitor viewing content. I love the presentation style it's very accessible and engaging. It's easy to listen to while doing other stuff.
Loving the new series, keep doing what you want to, and thanks for providing a great channel
I loved my Asus Splashtop. It came built in to my really high end (for the time) motherboard.
Interesting! I didn't think *anyone* bothered with splashtop / expressgate. I had it on my board as well but it didn't interest me in the least - I'm curious, did it's limitations not bother you? The fact you can't really save files or run any other software, that wasn't a problem?
@@CathodeRayDude I used splashtop back then for quick Google searches. And "the internet" as a teenager without a wifi enabled smartphone back in the day.
@@CathodeRayDude For me, it was there, so I had to mess with it and explore everything it could do. I am reasonably sure that I still have that motherboard tucked away somewhere. It was a long time ago, but I am pretty sure I even worked on re-flashing it and generally hacking on it. In the end, I enjoyed the concept, and the idea of a pre-boot OS, but didn't find it very useful at the time. I was heavily into multibooting every OS I could just to say I had "not dual boot, but 20 boot"
@@toodarkpark "not dual boot, but 20 boot" reminds me of the shit I did to our first family computer once we got something newer, meaning the old one was mine to do with as I pleased: started by saving the DOS bits of the win 98 install onto a couple of floppies before blowing it away (98 didn't run great on only 32mb of ram), then reinstalling the DOS bits stand alone. then installing NT 4, which I don't even know where I got the cd for from. then Red Hat Linux 6, which I got from the back of a library book (later Red Hat 8, from the guy who ran our local, dial-up ISP).
triple boot, such dumb fun!
I wish there was more of this form factor nowadays when it would actually make sense. A select few have made it in recent years but those have always been crazy expensive.
@@arsenalfanatic0971 I forget chromebooks exist. I tried out some early ones and they just left me very disappointed.
Yeah I had hoped windows on arm would've made more progress at this point. It is probably the future at least as far as laptops are concerned.
Yea the smart phone is too limited in terms of multitasking. it would be handy on the train or other moments where you have to wait a long time but you are not at home .but its still too big and slow for quick trips or moments where you need to pay a little bit of attention. like on the bus or waiting for something that only takes a few minutes.
@@RisingRevengeance i recently got a Lenovo Yoga and set up Brunch to work on it as a secondary boot option and its almost the same thing. On a 13" 2-in-1 laptop, running Android tablet software is ridiculous but also absolutely beautiful
This is legit super interesting. I'm looking forward for the next episodes
The big transition OSes were really rough, early OS X was just so heavy but thankfully lacked bloatware. As a Mac user, I recall PCs of this era but am fascinated by goofy PC things like this. Good stuff.
Regarding SQL Server on consumer hardware/OS, the game Caesar IV used SQL for... something, and when you installed it you got SQL Server as well. I always thought that was odd.
Yes, this. Some game/programs/bloatware use it.
Possibly for storing settings..??? Still, there's no reason you couldn't use the Windows registry for that
This music is giving strong homestar runner vibes and I'm here for it
I remember someone at my school had one of those. I often think back and wonder how slow or under-powered it might have been. It just gave off slow vibes. I didn't remember what it was called, so I never looked it up. This video confirms everything I expected and more.
This topic seems super fascinating! I *think* I missed a good chunk of this by passing Vista, either by sticking with older windows or that may have been around the time I switched to Mac... I'm not sure, but the Vista triggers aren't as bad for some reason. XD
Really looking forward to this series! And joined your Patreon in large part to your wonderful previous videos (especially loved the "VOIP" series) and now this!
Would've been cool if you also had shows how fast the device would've booted if it had a clean Vista install without all the shitware.
Nevertheless, very interesting as always, thank you a lot! Very excited for more episodes of this series.
Yeah, I was bummed about that, I tried to come up with a strategy but the beef is, It's a horrible little 4200rpm ZIF drive in an absolutely miserable chassis. I spent a couple hours trying to get the drive out, but even if I could have, I didn't have a spare. So, if I wanted to install a clean OS, I'd have to format and risk destroying the recovery partition, and then it would be impossible to demo the machine in its original, agonizing state. Had it been a normal 2.5" drive I definitely would have swapped it out and done a clean install comparison.
For what it's worth: The Atom machine that appears briefly near the beginning is an eeePC that boots a clean vista load in about one minute, so there's a reference point. It's not fast by any means, but it's *much* better than this, haha.
@@CathodeRayDude I think there is merit to showing these computers with their stock, bloated OS as well. This is how they came from the factory and how most users got to experience them when they were relevant.
Sure, my Galaxy S3 on CarbonROM was a helluva lot faster than any of friends running TouchWiz, but there were maybe a couple of percent of Android users actually doing custom ROMs at the time.
Hi, @@CathodeRayDude I supposed you didn't try a clean OS install or any alternative OS like XP because something like this, do you know if it's feasible to source a ZIF to mSATA adaptor for these machines?
@@CathodeRayDude What about booting a small Linux live distro and DDing the entire HDD over the network or onto a USB storage medium? Both, as a backup in general and for messing around with other OSes?
@@resneptacle This. Bought an MSI slidebook in '15, DD'ed original Win8 install it came with, migrated my Linux install onto it. Sold it with original Win8 install DD'ed back into it, but on a larger SSD, and extra partition.
My Linux install is now on its 3rd laptop over a decade :)
Got to watch the first few minutes, and I already can’t wait to get home and finish this!
Love your channel. Can't wait for the rest of this series.
The last time it took me this long to install an OS was when I tried to install Windows XP in a Pentium 75 machine with 64 MB of RAM, a 32 MB GPU and 2 GB of storage. The installation took 3 hours and the system would take 15-20 minutes to boot.
Love that t-shirt :D As a small side note, there are attempts to create new operating systems from scratch, eg. there's Redox OS which is written in Rust, or Cosmos which is a fully managed OS written in C#. But these are very far away from being usable as daily drivers and more like tech demos / hobbyist projects. Sadly not even Linux can have a real foothold on mainstream desktops, maybe this will change now as Linux gaming becoming a real deal.
calling Cosmos an OS is kinda an overstatment honestly. It's very impressive, don't get me wrong, it's more of a framework that runs C# console apps on bare metal. there's not much you can do other than like, print stuff to the screen, possibly disk IO, maybe networking, and if you're lucky, primative graphics
There's also SerenityOS, which occupies the same space, being usable, but far from complete (still, it's an incredible project for what it is).
@@Bobbias this remind me of ReactOS which is again a very interesting project.
Don't forget plan9. :p Which some people actually do daily drive, on very select hardware, and even then it's pretty sub-optimal support/performance.
There is a entire community (the OSDev community) centered around making new operating systems from scratch in some cases even in a custom language.
They aren't really meant to be daily drivers but most should be good enough for a basic quick start OS especially since it doesn't need a bunch of drivers. If if you need some special drivers Yggdrasil Linux has shown that a OS can actually continue to use BIOS drivers and that has become even easier on UEFI.
Was enthralled by InstantON plenty, but I have to point out just how well you laid down the problem
I was one of those that by chance, and just by running my XP install and machine to the ground
I skipped from Vista right over to 7, I must've had some hand-me downs in storage because even back then.
I felt XP and 7's boot time wasn't as fast as I'd like, and mind you. XP is the first OS I ever used
To my knowledge, a lot of manufacturers used Splashtop OS as the basis for their instant-on offerings. LG Smart On, Lenovo Quick Start, and Asus Express Gate are all Splashtop. JoliOS was an odd OS I used to use that was basically instant on despite being the "Main" OS.
I had a relatively high end laptop from the era and it ran Vista with not much issue the same with windows 7. On that machine I don't remember the horrors that many did with Vista. I certainly don't remember boot times taking that long. I'm so looking forward to this series.
I love the detail that testui writes directly to a black hole
Love the Homestar Runner-esque casio music
I didn't expect to be so fascinated by this topic I'd never heard about. I'm definitely looking forward to more from this series!
You should be as famous as Technology Connections, the amount of research you put in your videos is incredible.
Also DID I SEE CREATIVE COMMONS AT THE END? :O
As for personal experience, I'm guilty of not formatting most of my machines for the fear of not being able to find the correct drivers or some other important thing...😅
Also, I remember this feature!
One of my uncle's laptops had this embedded mp3 player mode, and as a kid I didn't know what switch to flip to turn it off 😅 I thought I broke his PC!
Also I thought that was some embedded firmware on an extra chip that they reused from unsold mp4 players, not full on Linux :o
Really looking forward to this series! I have the same brain worms. Always been into bespoke single use devices. Early PDAs, calculators, etc.
I can't wait to see your episode on HP East Web, I had it on my Beats laptop (yes, HP had a partnership's with Beats by Dre and stuck the logo on a laptop (2000's wes wild bro)) and it had HP Easy Web and I used it for Skype constantly. I feel horrible for throwing it away cause I know it's the type of thing which should be on this channel.
I love your "waiting for bloatware to load" background music
what a fantastic video. how have i only just discovered this channel!?
if 4 minutes to boot is the worst pc you’ve ever owned, you have been lucky!
Enterprise systems with a shit load of hardware to POST with can take a long time, and they sound like a jet taking off. If he used a CF card mod and reinstalled everything clean, it might be a snappy little machine.
@@sbrazenor2 CF card? Please these machines come with 160 gig or lager hard disk, it's not the 90s, Vista needs space. However you can use a 44pin mini-IDE to mSata adapter, it shouldn't cost much more than $20 in total including a smallish SSD.
It was the time you came into the office, put the computer on and got coffee while booting.
I never would have expected a single video, let alone a whole series to be made on this topic, and I'm so glad you're doing one.
I remember my dad's XP work laptop from that era. It was loaded with management and Antivirus software but by no means low speced. Took usually 5+ minutes to boot that thing and he'd hope there were no updates to do after shutdown which might add up to 30min extra.
He said he always went to grab a coffee and chat with colleagues after he arrived to wait for the laptop.
Man that brings me back. I do seem to recall hearing about a dual booting system. If I remember right it was a x86 arm combo. I think it was supposed to have a web browser, but I think the caveat was that it couldn't see the drive on the system(and possibly didn't have persistent storage of its own). But it still seemed like a neat idea having a quick booting browser if you just wanted to quickly look something up.
sir, I cannot wait for the next installment! Always interesting and entertaining. Fave channel on the tubes (just subbed on Patreon to help with your fine work)
I worked at Best Buy when Vista came out. They sold lots of poorly spec'ed laptops and they were so slow with Vista. Vista needs 3+ gigs of ram to run well.
jfc, I was there. many people hated it, «DO NOT PANIC PEASANTS!» always carrying an XP pro CD with me.
This takes me back to a desktop PC a friend of mine had at the time. His mom didn't trust a bunch of high school kids to "build" a fancy computer so she bought a crazy expensive pre-built thing. It came with an LCD which at the time was still quite trash with super slow refresh rate and washed out colours but the coolest feature was a giant knob at the top that could also switch to media options without powering on the computer. It had a DVD/CD mode and a built-in TV tuner card for regular TV that was accessible without booting to windows. The craziest thing about it was if you touched that knob it would immediately jump to whatever thing you set it yo even in windows almost definitely crashing whatever you were doing before. If you we're playing a game and then accidentally turned the knob to TV tuner it would immediately switch to a full screen TV tuner app and obviously not a lot of games liked getting minimized or switched over like that. The TV tuner and DVD crap still ran in windows but I think the instant on stuff loaded from some secret board or something because we did a fresh install of windows once and that broke the knob in windows mode but it still retained the "instant on" knob feature.
I had an Asus G71 when I first went off to college in 2009, and it had a very similar feature that I want to say was called Express Gate. I last used that machine in 2011, so you just unlocked a dozen year old memory.
Looking forward to what’s next!
It was either expressgate or (based on the era maybe more likely) expressgate cloud, which (as our host pointed out to me elsewhere while I was hyping this series up) are two very different systems despite the similarity in name
@@THEmuteKi I went and found some old reviews and it was ExpressGate. I ditched the G71 for a G73 which I used till the end of 2016, and have had a G751 ever since.
I got a lot of good laughs at the snark. I'm ready for this series!
In honor of your amogus shirt. 9:40 "Wait is it still recovering?" "Always has been"
There are full-blown rackmount servers that have a similar feature. HP Has "Smart Deploy" where you can boot into some kind of embedded Linux running a terribly outdated version of Firefox, it takes 3 minutes to load, and then Firefox is in full-screen the entire time and you can't exit it or connect to other websites. The only thing you can do in this environment is either get the status of the hardware on the machine (which you can do a heck of a lot easier if you just plug in the IPMI port and use a web browser on another computer) and hit a button to instantly "Download and deploy" some (I'm assuming, it actually doesn't work anymore) outdated version of Windows Server or Redhat. I have one of these servers currently in my server rack.
Dell also made a server that boots into a terrible version of Windows 95(?) instead of the BIOS screen so they could offer a proper mouse-controlled UI. I have a friend that owns one of those servers. The UI is terrible and it has actual honest-to-god WordArt in place of the traditional BIOS page headings.
at first i thought i was going to have a hard time watching the whole video but here I am at the end and seeing this was only uploaded 4 days ago. And now I subscribe and wait for more of this series!