¥220,000 Japanese Laptop from 1999: Unboxing a Sony Vaio PCG-777/BP
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- čas přidán 1. 06. 2024
- Opening up and testing out a Japanese Sony Vaio PCG-777 BP laptop! Costing the equivalent of between $2K-$3,000 in 1999, it's an A4 file-sized notebook PC with a 266MHz Pentium MMX, 64MB RAM, 4GB hard drive, and modular floppy and CD-ROM drives. Checking out its bundled software and trying out some games for DOS and Windows 98!
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Here's an archive of the Japanese recovery CD-ROMs:
archive.org/details/vaio-pcg-...
● Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound:
www.epidemicsound.com
00:00 Overview of the PCG-777
04:14 Unboxing!
13:41 Adding New Rubber Feet
15:50 Powering On
19:12 Testing Drives
21:12 Preinstalled Software & Stuff
35:15 Playing Some Games!
41:44 The Final Word
#LGR #Retro #Unboxing - Věda a technologie
PCX Town was a store of personal computers and electronic parts in Osaka, Japan, although it has already gone bankrupt.
The computer in this video may have been sold by me, at the time I was an employee there and also sold this model well, SONY VAIO was a relatively high-end brand and was bought by a rich man. I think, at that time, relatively reasonable American models had already arrived, so we were buying such models, because it was a cheap monthly salary.
I made a comment because the name of a nostalgic store came out.
Sugoi. LGR posts a video of an ancient Japanese laptop and the person who could've very well sold it in Japan is in the comments section. I love the internet.
@@sheik124 man small world we live in
also why isn't this top comment
Oh man, what a nice comment. Love the internet and how it brings us all closer together.
@@sheik124 The only way that this could be any better is if the original owner of the laptop also happened to be here, which I honestly don't doubt.
That's amazing
In case anyone didn't know about the beauty of the VAIO logo (it's one of the best hidden meaning tech logos). If I remember correctly the philosophy behind the VAIO line was Sony passing from analog into digital (that is why there is a lot of media stuff on the PC). The VA is a sine wave (analog), the IO is binary (1/0, digital).
Cool video, I love old Sony stuff.
Indeed, but the VA stands for Video/Audio. So it’s Video Audi Input Output, or VAIO for short :)
It goes deeper, I didn't even know that. Thanks for the info (:
VAIO = Video Audio Input Output
Wow! That is some really neat piece of trivia! Thanks! Now I want to buy a VAIO so that I can tell everyone that, any change I get! 😂
Wow that’s neat, wonder if they came up with that themselves or had a brand consultant come up with it.
It was a great name, easily read and pronounced
“They put this back together well” lolol you have no idea. I once ordered a two volume biography of Buddha from a religious publisher in Japan. Even though the volumes together were selling for 400usd used, they sold both to me for like 40usd total and when they got to me I was amazed. I have never seen someone use common packing and shipping materials and make it look nicer than any present I’ve ever gotten for Christmas or my birthday in my entire life. Japanese are just amazing sometimes.
We sometimes order stuff through buyee or other kinda yahoo auctions sites, and even if it's just random stuff I always get it very nicely packed with a ton of care.
They even include handwritten notes sometimes, one said, in japanese, that they hope I am very happy with what I received and I should contact them when I do.
I managed to do so, somehow, in English though :)
i ordered the nintendo dream animal crossing new leaf guidebook and it was in emaculate condition, packaged so well and still had all its slips and original receipt (and a train ticket but it was a placeholder marker in the middle of a page so)
i was like woah
How’d you get them so cheap?
Hmmmm....
@@parlinmains this was some years ago but Amazon was showing both books as out of print. I kinda had my heart set on them because the volumes had come highly recommended but third party sellers in the US were asking over 300usd for one of the volumes. I did research found an email for the publisher and messaged them asking if they had any old copies laying around. Somebody messaged me yes and offered to sell them to me for the original retail price. Gotama Buddha vol 1 and 2 are the books. I could have picked up v1 for like 50usd of Amazon but v2 was over 300 if I had went with a Amazon seller.
I just love that the VAIO wallpaper says "digital dream". That's so vapourwave.
it was 1999 my guy, y2k was upoun us this is reeking of y2k aesthetic realness and i love it
Two things I've noticed after living in Tokyo for over 15 years; 1) second hand stuff tends to be in waaaay better condition than you'd typically expect in the west. 2) People tend to leave the stickers on everything,; shower heads, cookers, taps, electronics etc.
10 years after buying my apartment in Ikebukuro and I still have the stickers and protective layer on my cooking range and bath panel. Can confirm lol.
@@Naruga Right?! I recently pulled a bunch of stickers off of stuff in the kitchen and bathroom and almost felt guilty!
@@RGEE1979 their entire culture is predicated on the idea that physical form is holy. Because of this ideal I think they just know how to look after their stuff, and how to repair things better. And boy does it show in their engineering, those guys are amazing engineers.
@@Naruga Please remove the stickers. They are for shop display only.
@@jimb12312 Too late. After 10 years, the plastic has faded around the sticker, so he'll be left with a ugly patch if he takes them off now.
Hey Clint, just a warning about the CMOS battery, they are NiMH and they will leak. I have the model immediately prior to the 777 and it's CMOS battery leaked pretty severely. Just thought you might want to know this
When Clint is so comfortable in Windows 98 that he can navigate it in a foreign language.
When the icons and other symbolism (text style, colours, etc) are the same as you're used to, the text labels don't much matter. I regularly help people whose phones or computers are set to languages I don't know, but since I know what icons to look for I can navigate and help them just fine (find the cog, click the blue button, type this into the first field and that into the second, then click the green button... or something like that).
In fact I'm more annoyed when using my own machine at work because Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided that the keyboard shortcuts for bold, italic, and find (and others) should be localised, and I'm more used to the otherwise universal (outside of Microsoft) English-based shortcuts - at least cut, copy, paste, undo, and save are kept the same (although, now that I think of it, save might very well be an accident since it starts with the same letter in my language, copy can't be localised since it has the same initial letter as italic, and cut, paste, and undo aren't based on initial letter anyway).
Lol!!! Thanks for the laugh of truth
@@Tipman2OOO laugh? What is funny?
@@__Mr.White__ the truth of being able to navigate windows in a foreign language in a pinch just because of familiarity.
@@Tipman2OOO Mhh ok.
For anyone who owns one of these: The performance issues with the last game are most likely due to lack of (or outdated) DirectX/DirectDraw runtime. This was a separate download from Microsoft (or often can be found on the game CD in a separate folder for manual install) and did not come with graphics chip drivers. If DirectDraw fails to load the game probably falls back to using GDI for graphics, and the performance of GDI is always terrible regardless of CPU or graphics chip spec.
Well, no matter what runtimes you install on one of these, you will never get Direct3D nor DirectDraw, because the NeoMagic chips don't do it.
No 2D acceleration, no 3D acceleration. Just basic VESA VGA capabilities.
Though its basic VGA speed is good which is why Duke3D ran decently.
The scaler is also the one integrated in the NeoMagic cards and it's baaaaaaad.
Windows 9x laptops just hit different, there's a sense that we are still in the wild west days of portable computing, and so many things seem familiar to modern standards, but entirely weird at the same time.
It was when they still had skills to make usable software, with neat and logical, easy-to-use UIs and efficient program functionality.
After Windows XP, all software has become increasingly bloated, with cluttered, illogical, unintuitive UIs, and more and more useless in general.
@@TheSimoc They fixed it with Windows 10. They realized they couldn't make a UI worth a damn and just gave us a search bar.
@@poisonouslead85 Yes, that has been my very thought. In post-XP era (and since then applying on all major OSes and other software on every platform), the new paradigm has been that instead of keeping things organized for good (which was improved till the XP and contemporaries), now on we can and must have everything crappiled, and search any needed thing like a needle from haystack. That paradigm has progressed step by step, UIs getting more and more horrible, and then providing search bars as a more and more central elements.
This is NOT good development.
This was my first laptop. A hand-me-down. With it’s cracked hinge which turned all blacks to greens on the display, dead charging mechanism and lack of a few key caps I still loved it to death ❤️
Do you happen to know more details on what causes the green display issue? I also have a Win98-era VAIO exhibiting that problem. It has had stiff hinges for a long time, but the green display issue only came up recently, and if I understand your comment, they're related?
@@austinleong3319 no idea. Could probably be a damaged display connector or damaged panel / controller
Working on repairing my own old laptop, as long as the core electronics still work I won't let that old trooper die, my 2012 era laptop might well outlive my current 2019 laptop simply because it's so much more repairable (and stubborn)
“It’s a Sony”
I can hear it... Said by no other than dankpods...
@@MrKubape Imagine an LGR Dankpods crossover
"It's a high tier nugget!"
@@MrKubape Hey now. Cathode Ray Dude is the Sony guy!
@@MrKubape I'm actually surprised that DankPods is subscribed to and has been a long time viewer of this channel.
I use to work at a pc repair shop and loved working on Vaio's. Something about the esthetics that really were pleasing to me.
Gotta love LGR for using "Duke Nukem 3D" as a benchmark for nearly everything on existance.
The question isn't can it run crysis or doom, the question is can it run Duke Nukem 3D?
@@dotz0cat Yup. If there was cardiac pacemaker with a small led screen, i bet LGR will bench mark it with Duke Nukem 3D while the patient is lying on the hospital bed.
Gotta love LGR.
Moved to Japan in ‘02 and remember checking out Vaios at shops like Yodobashi and Bic Camera during my weekly visits (they had SO much tech on display). Vaios were almost always the most expensive laptops available. Definitely nice to look at though!
I love how these shops are often still, traditionally, called something .. "Camera" even though they've long expanded way beyond camera
Are you Canadian?
@@nerd2544 That's the million dollar question.
@@thotslayer9914 Spent 15 years there, but left a couple years ago now.
0:11 "Show physicial evidence of my increasing lack of impulse control when it comes to buying computers from Japan"
I can relate. On a whim I just bought a hand full of non working Dell XPS 8700 (Haswell) computers on ebay just to see if I can restore them to their orginal 2015 glory... Success!!
Are they special?
@@savagedick1462 No, most were purchased on the outlet site and were activated after my 8900s in '16. You can find out alot from the service code including the Windows 10 Ser# for re-activation. Not bad for $179 in one case.
*Even though PCs are so powerful and awesome now, I have much fonder memories of the good old stuff* 😫
Retro tech 👍
XP is love XP is life
yeah, it's called nostalgia, genius...
I miss the days when hardware went obsolete every 6 months! (No i don't)
@@barrymaaslow3480 wow you sound like a happy guy lol
It's amazing that a computer this old is still in such great shape. Even with stickers looking new.
The Japanese seem to generally take way better care of their stuff than most "westerners" and they're far more honest on their auctions. Something can be in perfect working order, but if it has a few scratches it'll get listed as "junk", while only almost pristine stuff gets sold as "used". Don't know if they consider all the stickers valuable, but if it comes with them, it's almost guaranteed they'll still be there when it's sold again
The speakers even sound surprisingly good for something from 1999: 26:16
It's not really strange. Sony devices always had the longest lifespan and good quality. They were always leaders in battery tech too, out of all the brands you can rely on Sony phones, PlayStation Vita, headphones... to have a functional battery for years and years.
@@thesteelrodent1796 I'd say they tend to go a step beyond honesty. Rather, it seems to be modesty oftentimes.
When I think of Sony in the 90s and 2000, I always think of the incredible amount of bloatware and background processes they had.
Oh heavens yes. They were always so slow by the time somebody called me to fix one.
Very true. I had a circa 2005-ish VAIO A series, and it had all this random stuff on it. Sony's Vegas and the like.
"Clippy is a dolphin in Japan" had me rolling
I remember these things were the coolest laptop you could own for a time. I was in college at the time and these things were as futuristic, sleek, and modern as you could get.
wow mate, either you can read Japanese or youve spent far too long in the windows 98 environment ! good work !
Im starting to feel old, Seeing that a laptop made my senior year of High School is considered antique and we are amazed that it still works.. LOL
9:28 The connector for the external Floppy drive looks so much like the original PlayStation memory card and the controller connector - the rounded edges and wavy bits that act as a bit of a grip especially. Sony just had this distinct design language and it's neat to see it extend to their other products as well.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug ;) Where do you keep all these gems, I imagine you having a tech-warehouse or something :D Thanks for another great video Clint! Enjoy your (easter)weekend!
He has a storage unit, that also serves as a studio. He moved the studio from his home to better separate his professional and personal life, as many CZcamsrs eventually find out its best.
@@WatanabeNoTsuna. Thanks for the info, it's much appreciated 👍🏻
@@spiritrulez There's a video about it on his channel called 'LGR - YouTubing Work vs. Home Life Balance' that goes over alot of it.
Also "Answering your questions questionably" is another one with some info.
Cool video! And I gotta say - either Clint knows Japanese, or he knows Windows 98 by heart, or he's running a realtime visual translation... All of these are equally impressive.
I think he just has Win98 memorized at this point, he's said in other vids he doesn't speak JP iirc
Dear lord that Vaio startup sound really dug up some childhood memories
The first laptop I had was a Vaio with windows XP, and I had it from the mid 2000's to early 2010's
I remember staying up late to watch some of the first Minecraft Skyblock lets plays on that thing
My first ever laptop was a Sony VAIO PCG-747. It cost a lot of money over here in the UK. £2000+. This video was a proper nostalgia trip for me. 👍
Sony really just hits the randomizer button when naming their products, eh?
no, they also slect the word length of that random name.
VA is analog and IO is digital. It marks their transition from analog to digital.
HP hits that button harder for their models, but with their face.
"15-af131dx" really rolls off the tongue.
That computer is in excellent shape. Most computers from this era that I see are just beat up.
Especially the Thinkpads of this era.
If you buy any used electronic from Japan, it will be in immaculate shape and immaculately packed
@@johncarolina4950 yea was going to mention that around this time people really took care of their stuff and so many companies made protective cases for everything. My dad's think pad from around this Era is still on such good shape. So is his cell phone from that Era lol . They didn't just throw stuff in the back seat of there car back then .
So true. I bet if you were to buy a similar model here in the US, the laptop's cosmetic condition alone would've made it look like it came out of a nuclear war.
It’s easy to beat up things that are meant to be portable and the older you get I bet the worse the carrying cases got.
I just love vintage computer stuff. Thank you so much for continuing to make these videos, its always the highlight of my day.
Gosh, this brought back so many memories. I moved to Tokyo in '98 and those VAIO models were always the holy grail for me seeing them on display everywhere a few years after my arrival
I have the -same laptop except in a lower spec configuration- predecessor to this laptop! It's a PCG-719. It has the MMX 233MHz and 1024x768 panel, but I got it with 128MB (maximum amount), so I'm not sure what the original RAM amount was. I got it essentially in pieces, it was very worn and used up. Such a cool laptop, except the hinge is very fragile due to the aging plastic. I had to 3D print replacement corners for the plastic base of the laptop to glue (using JB weld) to the back and hold the hinges together. The laptop worked great after all the work I put into it, but a year and a half ago, the backlight inverter died. Other than that, it could open basic webpages including Wikipedia with a PCMCIA wifi adapter. I also bought a NOS 3rd party battery for it on ebay that gave the laptop 5-6 hours of use. Someday, I will try to fix that inverter.
It's a very cool and interesting laptop. There is very little information online about it, and finding replacement parts is basically impossible, so it made me get creative to fix it up.
I have a Thinkpad 770X with a Wifi adapter, what browser do you use to open Wikipedia? Win98 IE6 doesn't work for me.
@@colombianguy8194 I remember using the last version of Firefox on Windows 2000 and it worked well. On Win 98 SE, I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure I didn't use IE. It was probably Firefox or a lesser known browser, but I mostly used Win 2000 since it worked much better and could run newer browsers. It could also be possible that Wikipedia was changed in some way since I last loaded it on my old Vaio a year and a half ago.
I love that the closed captioning calls Clint's laugh, "[goofy chuckling]"!
39:42 You even picked Asuka Honda's birthday to upload the video, well done!
That floppy disk reader is incredibly slick, love the colors.
The way you ended the video in sync with the maze screensaver was very satisfying.
The brand knew the perfect shade of purple to use in their design.
tysm for posting lgr! this made my birthday much more happier 🥺❤️
I love that greyish-lavender plastic Sony used on a lot of Vaio products. They were aesthetically next level.
39:40 how nice of you to release this on Asuka's birthday!
27:50 "Year of 1997" sounds like Dr. Steve Brule
29:39 There's actually a whole community trying to revive SAPARi! They were able to hack the evaluation version of the server software to remove its limitations. You can actually connect to it by editing the URL in the various .wrl files to their servers, and they have a very active and ongoing Discord server if you'd like to join in!
That's great!
Woah, that screensaver ended perfectly with the video, noice.
Editing! It's magic!
I super appreciate you letting us see the end of the Windows Maze at the end. Very satisfying when that happens.
Awesome video!!!. I feel the same joy when i play with my Thinkpad 770X that i bought from a guy in Germany, those are really portable time machines, greeting from Colombia Mr.LGR!
I had the old Sony Vaio C1 series and the UX Micro PC, they were great. I miss the innovations and creative ideas Sony used to have with their engineers.
I don't miss their proprietary connection solutions to common cable and media formats.
i miss the times when tech was actually interesting. now its all same bulk and grandmas reading fb. Whole internet it basicly lost.
Was looking into using UMPC hardware with modern SBC's... What a rabbit hole. Beautifully engineered stuff
I had a Vaio laptop in the late 2000s, 16:9 high contrast screen and integrated ATI graphics (which at the time was amazing for games), though the bespoke hinge was a bit flimsy. And when I had them repair the hinge it was stolen from their depot; and replaced with cash.
But damn was that a crazy good laptop for the time. It would still hold up today for most things apart from 1080p stuff. I think it had 128MB of dedicated VRAM and 3GB RAM which was a huuuuuge amount then. It cost something like £1200 new, now you can pick them up for £100 lol.
@@mrkhainuui this is actually true though, my pc looks precisely the same as all my friends pcs and I haven't seen anything new or different in a good while.
I swear, time is weird. First I see Cathode Ray Dude do a video on a VAIO camera laptop, and then suddenly like a day after I watch the video, LGR gets a VAIO laptop too, hah.
same
Same here!
The algoritm
Funny you posted this today because I got a box from Japan full of stuff for a project. This video has convinced me to buy more stuff. Damn you, Clint.
this era of laptops is so fascinating with the whole expansion card "boom" I remember my dad freaking out about wireless cards for his 1999 Hitachi Laptop
hey clint, speaking of early vr/metaverse places. do you remember ACTIVE WORLDS ? it was a vr meeting place in the mid 90s and you could build your own house, that you had to go to a building supply place and get materials. it was pretty amazing for the time.
The old VAIOs were great!
It's hard to believe how many new old stock there is still out there. I realize this is used, but I still find it amazing how well preserved this machine is, over 20 years!
1999 March.... Getting my first Playstation... so many memories!
Now THIS is the Sony I remember!
I need to get my hands on those midi files.
Same, I'm a bit of a midi fanatic.
The dance song Clint played screams "dead mall walkthrough" to me.
@@EvilTurkeySlices me too XD thats why i sometimes search for covers of famous soundtracks and upload them as Midi played on real hw
:)
The "Chat Show" MIDI is a Yamaha XG demo MIDI, you can find it online. But it really needs to be played through an XG MIDI device, or Yamaha's XG VST, to sound right.
@@Dan-TechAndMusic Do you have a link so i can try it on my 386pc with the Roland SC-55?🙂
How serendipitous to see a Vaio video today, cause I just got a PCG-505 on eBay yesterday - also from 1999! I think it's kinda like this one, just shrunk down a little and with a 333 MHz Celeron! Really excited to get it in and compare it with this Japanese beauty~!
My parents got me a VAIO PCG-FX103 in 2001 for college. It's STILL going.
I was there for all of 1999, and while I agree the Vaio had some cool ideas and this was certainly a fun review of it, I feel if I spilled 3 grand on any computer that chugged that bad on a 2D game, 1999 me would have popped a blood vessel.
You have to remember though that you're still talking about a notebook in the year 1999. Back then, these devices weren't made for gaming, but rather for productive use.
Notebooks have always been behind their non-portable counterparts - and I guess they will be always behind a proper PC which has a more or less unlimited access to electricity.
Yeah, gonna have to say you're overestimating 1999 you's reaction. Being able to play up to date games on a notebook size machine is more of a 2005 and onward thing, "non-gaming" notebooks only start regularly shipping with a graphics processors of any notable grunt in 2008 (as lesson learned from Vista causing a mini market crash).
@@maio290 well back in the day I had a notebook that was perfectly capable to play Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight at around 20-25 fps
@@KS-xo3oh The point was more "modern laptops are a marvel compared to what was standard before", NOT "Laptops are better than desktops now lul" .
Vaio laptops were just the coolest in the late 90s/early 00s. Every one was totally out of my price range of course, they were just things I saw in magazines and wanted.
Nice laptop with good port locations. Some of the later Vaios had the ports near the bottom right where they perfectly interfered with external mouse movements.
I love the intro!
🥚🐇🐣 Happy Easter! 🐣🐇🥚
Early!!
I have a Sony Vaio desktop running XP as part of my retro gaming space in the basement. Its a VGC RB30 with a 3ghz Pentium 4 HT.
Unfortunately somebody toke the factory graphic card and TV tunner/video/audio in card that it would've come with. I've done some retrofitting to it since the machine is no longer stock. I'm also missing all the software
Refit upgrades
Original 420watt PSU replaced with a new old stock DAYNEX 500 watt PSU
Maxed to 4gb DDR ram
Installed a ATI sapphire Radeon HD 3650 (the 512mb dual dvi model)
Creative Labs Audigy SE with the EAX 4.0 software patch
500gb Seggate HDD (its old and getting warn loud bearings but still works)
Edit 2 add
Finally found a pci usb 2.0 card for it, yea four more usb ports!(Seriously needed them)
There’s no higher delight to watch a review of a classic Vaio. I miss so much this machines. Thanks for sharing!
A laptop from my birthyear! It's been awhile Clint since I've perused your LGR retrotech reviews
You have no idea how much I love you for ending the video on the completion of the maze screensaver
Back in 98-99 I spent so much time playing o.g. doom and jazz on an older ibm laptop running windows 95. This thing would of been so fancy with it's Win 98 AND a cd-rom drive. :D
I found for the removing sticky things where adhesives were (e.g. where the old feet were) that lighter fluid or anything with naphtha in it works great
Yeah bro just lather your computer with flammable liquids great idea homie
@@vxcvxmcrposfdsdfulpdfg Yeah, fair point because no other solvents are flammable or caustic, right? But I suppose in your case, I might recommend drinking. Homie.
This is my favorite laptop. Just, like, one of my favorite objects that exists on this earth. Thank you so much for making this video.
The little postpet sticker!!
my mom had a similar looking one back in the day. was pretty cool to play around with the internet (which we never really understood before).
This is what charlie puth watches at night
I'm surprised by all the paper documentation. Most of my exposure with laptops of that era were with business oriented systems, that shipped with much less extra documentation.
Why did they do that? Was it implied that businesses would be more knowledgeable about it, or maybe as a way to save paper. Did companies have techs that should know or have access to that documentation or repair knowledge? Sorry, a lot of questions
@@Midnastar Paper saving. Large businesses normally don't keep the factory software intact. They wipe or image over the oem software with their own in-house OS install and pre-installed applications by way of hard hard drive imaging software. Since the factory software package no longer exists, there is no reason for IT to retain any of the documentation. The IT department maintains software version control and site licensing. The corporate IT helpdesk is the first level of service. If hardware needs service or there is an application specific problem, the service request gets routed to the group that services that issue.
@@timmooney7528 Thank you for sharing 😊
Been watching you for years now love old computers.
I always enjoy your videos.
Finally something worthy of my mobile data quota while @ the cabin for easter 😃 🐣🌞🗿
So-Net is an ISP that is still around in Japan, fully owned by Sony. :)
They are trying to push their new fiber optic network Nuro now.
Finally caught up to the most recent LGR videos.
First Cathode Ray Dude’s awesome Sony camcorder laptop thingy video and now this. Awesome! Sending ❤️ from Seattle to WNC.
I had this exact machine (slightly different model number)! I bought it in 1999 at CompUSA. It lasted a year before exhibiting charging problems. The repair shop could not fix it as Sony refused to sell spare parts for it and Sony refused to cover it under warranty.
Sony was truly ahead of it's time /s
@@SuperSmashDolls lmao
I approve of Clint's increasing lack of impulse control. Hehehe..
The illustration on that pod box brings me back to the days of walking up and down the pc games aisle at Media Play, picking out a game with my birthday money basing the choice on only the description and screenshots on the back.
oh man that VAIO startup chime at 15:18 brought back memories i didn't even know i had
Been binging another kind of old technology myself lately, watching the full run of the computer chronicles over the last few months... ever thought about trying to get an interview or something with Stewart Cheifet? From what I can gather the man is still relatively active in the tech sphere at the age of 83!
@@craigjensen6853 Haha, oh man that would make it even better! He was always so serious on CC and games almost always painted as frivolous activities :D
@Egmont Well, now I just want to hear LGR and Cheifet talk old games!
hello fellow computer chronicles binger
just started a few days ago (but it's been lying around in my saved playlists for a while now) but have to stop for a while because exams :(
H e l l Y e a h
My first laptop was a PCG-K15!
Love me some VAIO content, Clint!
Killer stuff~
Nice to see one of these in such great shape Normally this age of laptop would end up in a junk shop like Hard Offs bargain bucket .. I'm sure that keyboard wasn't used but external one.. great find
Loved your Video LGR, you should really do a special on VRML, when i was a child, i received a cd full of download webpages by a site, and contained a bunch of VRML things. Unfortunately i've lost it, however i've noticed that nobody really talks about it nowadays.
I've always left the stickers on my laptops in the past, never been too sure 'if I'm meant to remove them' or not. Think only exception is one netbook had it peel off over time on its own
I generally don't bother removing those stickers. Besides, sometimes stickers don't come off cleanly, and I don't want to be bothered with glue residue. I still have a sticker on my laptop saying it has Windows 10 in S mode, a micro-edge display, and backlit keyboard. The part about S mode is a tad comical, because when I set this thing up, S mode was one of the first things to go. XD
I like getting stuff from Japan. They take pretty good care of their stuff and/or do some minor restorations before they ship their used products out. It's nice.
> do some minor restorations before they ship their used products out
this. Even their 2nd hand game market always looks great & preserved!
You need to make a museum of all the cool stuff you have got!
Do you really sit down and write the captions of every video!!
It's very detailed and amuzing
What a beauty! Looks like it's been hardly used. I wonder why Sony didn't get into ruggedised laptops as they seem pretty lucrative for Panasonic. Seems like a massive missed opportunity there
Good question. I wonder if they had some kind of unspoken agreement not to compete. Have Panasonic ever made laptops that aren't Toughbooks ?
@@MrDuncl Also a good question. It looks like they made a few regular laptops in the mid to late 90's and then only made Toughbooks from then on. Dell seems to be the only company that makes regular and ruggedised laptops so it certainly seems like Sony and Panasonic may have had some sort of agreement.
@@MrDuncl Panasonic has been making the Let'snote laptop in Japan for 26 years.
Outside of Japan, it was sold under the name Toughbook Light.
The 90's was the best decade.
Its not even a hot take. They were fkn awesome 😪
Ahh Vaio... I had a Sony Vaio VGN-N31M back in 2008, good memories.
My first laptop was a Sony VAIO PCG-FX370 (model PCG-992L) Notebook and it looks almost exactly like this version. I just went and dug in my office closet and its still in my old laptop bag from college, with all the recovery CD's as well.
Clint trying to financially justify this purchase is amazing. Who am I kidding I’m guilty of this myself
I've definitely noticed that Japanese people seem far more likely to keep the original box and everything in it than we do in the West. I think 4 of my Librettos came with the original box and most if not all of the contents (albeit not all pristine), and I know it isn't that uncommon with other listings from private sellers either. But then I've also seen some commercial sellers list up laptops that are so heavily destroyed that most Western sellers would just scrap them completely, not even being worth parting out.
This PCG-777 is clearly the distant ancestor of the 2002-era PCG-FX601 that was the very first retro laptop I got working, a laptop I have very fond memories of but one that sadly died when its IDE controller decided to object to a hard drive swap and stopped working properly. I replaced it with an FX805 or something like that, but it isn't the same.
What I've never understood about Sony laptops is their inconsistency when it comes to voltages. With Sony, they're either 16V or 19V - but bizarrely the two would co-exist all the way from the 1990s to at least the late 2000s, meaning you're never quite sure exactly which laptop will use which voltage. At least most share the same connectors within the voltage, with a few exceptions, and the 16V Sony bricks are generally identical to Fujtisu ones as well. Meanwhile, I've used a 19V Sony power supply for my monitor for many years now, as it was cheaper and stronger than the original LG unit and far better built!
Here the value is reduced greatly if it doesn't have box / leaflets etc. Also worry if you need to move and want to keep the boxes to help make it easy (that last one just for me lol)
Love the captions [water-soluble chuckling]
LGR thx for being my go to computer historian
I love the Sony design from this time period. I always wanted one but didn’t have the money for a computer back then, let alone a Sony one.
A neat laptop from Japan!
the early vaio line in the grey and lilac are one of my favorite eras of computer design
My first laptop was the Vaio Z600 LEK - fully loaded and around £2000 I think in 99/00 - I’d just started working as a programmer and was buying my first house. Sold all my desktop machines and all the accessories to downsize to a single portable. That was the last time I owned a desktop as a daily until last summer!
What a great machine and way ahead of Apple at that time. I eventually replaced it with the Apple Titanium PowerBook a few years later.
This video brings back memories of my first unbox and setup.