Sony s150

I was talking to the Sony sales rep today and he told that you can physically upgrade the 32 meg video cardin the S150. So if I wanted to change out the video card a year from now it would not be problem. Is this true?

 

If you can get a Radeon 9700 with 64 MB VRAM designed for S150/170 and have all the equipment and skills needed for such task, yes.[ ]

Laptops are put together buy people just like us, only they are trained and have the right tools and components, so all the options available in S170 are "Physically Possible" to be upagraded from a stock S150. The sales rep's statement is true, but the underlying assumption is that you have the "right stuff" to do so. Personally, I think you are better off joining Japan's S Series one-year buy-back program (guess you better live in Japan for a year[ ])or buying an S170 with 9700 XBrite but lower memory, HDD, & CPU (these three had been proven to be reasonably easy for users to upgrade themselves).

 

Well then!

I ordered my sony s170 specificly from sonystyle.com because I could get it with OUT the XBRITE, but rather a true TFT display. But, the downside to doing this was it came with the 32mb video card by default. Now, after reading the above posts i presume that i can upgrade my non-xbrite laptop to a 64mb video card?

 

You would have to call Sony and ask them to give you the Radeon 9700 designed for S170 or help you install it in your laptop. Whether they will give you one or install it is hard to tell. The sale just say it's "physically possible"...[ ]

 

Take anything that those people answering the phones say with a grain of salt. They have made numerous technical errors giving information to people. When the A-series first came out I called and was told it came with a 32MB-128MB Radeon 9700, which was upgradeable by adding more video RAM (!?!?!). That, of course, was just totally untrue. I get the feeling most of the people answering Sony's phone are just making stuff up on the fly and guessing from the info they're reading off the SonyStyle site (which may also be incorrect).

The only way to be sure of the specs is by checking the foreign (Japan and Europe) sites which seem to have had more accurate information. In more than one case, since the release of the S and A series, people on the forums have repeatedly called SonyStyle US and gotten incorrect info, then eventually forced SonyStyle into correcting their data.

I'm not saying it's impossible to swap out the video card, but I'm pretty sure the phone operator was just making that up. It also might be tough to get ahold of the video card module spare part from Sony.