TZ and standard hard drive?

I was wondering how well the TZ can handle Vista with a standard 4200 rpm drive? Is it even worth it to buy one without an SSD?

 

well i don't know if a standard size HDD would even fit in it.

 

lol hes asking how it performs with the stock HD

 

and I was wondering the same thing cause I found one for $1299 brand new

 

Opinion varies, but in the TZ owners thread the consensus seems to be that 4200rpm drives in the TZ give very sluggish performance. It's bearable, just, but you'd likely want to downgrade to XP to gain some performance back, at least.

If I was buying a TZ, I'd need the SSD. Hence I'm getting a Z.

 

My TZ11 came with the stock HD (80Gb), and I'm still waiting for SSD prices to come down to update it...

Frankly, it depends what you do. It takes a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time to boot, that's for sure, but as long as you use the sleep modeand only reboot when you have too, I find it very bearable for office apps (web, outlook, word, excel, etc). It's also fine to play MP3, DVD images or even HD movies in H264, or old games (I'm talking like 3-5 years old here!). So to do anything the TZ was intended for, it's fine.
Now if you need/love to reboot all the time, or plan to do anything more serious (playing recent games, do any kind of picture / video editing, playing AVCHD videos, etc...), the HD doesn't help (but is probably less of alimitation than CPU:GPU anyway).

If you really HAVE to buy one today (knowing that the Montevina refresh is coming in September/October), I'd say the HD is absolutely fine for light, office use. By the way I think Vista SP1 is fine (with 2gb), and I wouldn't downgrade to XP given the benefits of Vista for a laptop (especially the way it handles offline files, which is fantastic, and power management, which is much better).

I should also say that I only use my TZ as a secondary computer (on the move, in bed, etc...). I have a very powerful desktop to do everything I need, so I would certainly feel more frustrated if this was my main computer.

 

If you don't mind upgrading: Toshiba and Samsung make 1.8" 5400rpm drives. Size 120GB and 160GB.

 

The TZ150 I have with the stock 4200 revolutions per minute 100 GB hard disk drive cold boots Vista SP1 in ~40 seconds from the moment I press the emerald green power button to the time the desktop is shown on the screen. It's pretty fast for me (depending on your definition of "fast") when opening programs with most programs opening in 5 seconds or less, and with heavier programs (IDEs such as NetBeans, paint programs such as The Gimp, and whatnot) opening in 10 seconds or less. If you use the stock OS that Sony ship with it, you're not going to get good performance though. You need to install a completely clean Vista OS if you want it to be as fast as it possibly can be with Vista. Vista tweaks and weekly Disk Cleanups and Defrags help too.