Sony Vaio FX-101

I couldn't find a thread about this laptop using the search so I thought I'd start one.



I bought one of these new in the UK about 8 years ago and it's still going strong in spite of the second memory slot burning out.

I replaced the 10gb hard drive with a 40gb one, got rid of the awful CD drive which only worked when it wanted to and upped the RAM to 256mb. I added a DVD drive from the F series which fits and works perfectly despite having a completely different colour scheme. I also have the floppy drive but I've used it all of twice to flash the BIOS - once for XP and then back to Windows 2000.

Apart from Windows Me which it came with, I had it running XP (until SP3 made it far too slow), then changed it to Windows 2000 (and found the drivers for those annoying devices which had yellow exclamation marks!) but now it runs Ubuntu 8.10 quite happily (even the Hotkeys are catered for!).



I just thought I'd share my joy. Hello, everybody!

 

Nice, nothing better than refitting old machines and making them useful. Something downright gratifying about making them work well, especially if you can find replacement parts for cheap or free (which is often the case). What kind of processor is kicking it that beast?

 

Just a Celeron 600. I've read on other forums that it's possible to turn it into a real Pentium III with the right mobile processor but it seems like a lot of trouble for very little gain.

I think there was some kind of lawsuit about the second memory slots on these things being faulty and/or burning out back in the day. There were various fixes posted including jamming folded paper in to hold the second RAM chip in place which utimately caused the whole machine to burn out so I'm lucky to have one that still works. Without being able to take it up to the maximum 512mb though it's never going to be any more use than it is now - which is, of course, as a glorified DVD player, internet browser and word processor.