Sony Vaio Ultraportable

Sony Vaio Ultraportable
Participants	Melan
Skills	Linux, computers, Japanese
Status	Info gathering
Niche	Electronics
Purpose	Electronics, fun, world domination
Tool	No
Location
Cost
Tool category

Sony Vaio Ultraportable

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Browsing Yahoo Auctions, I stumbled across a listing for a Sony Vaio P series ultraportable. Which started to tickle my interest in these ultra-portable laptops as they would make for ideal pocket Linux terminals. The interest manifested itself even more after I managed to win an auction for one.

And thus, I would like to document my voyage into the world of these ultra-portable machines.

Sony Vaio VGN-P92KS

The auction I won was cheap, just a mere ¥4400 (€33.09 not yet calculating shipping and importing costs.). Of course it was cheap for a reason, as the title of the auction had "ジャンク" in the title, meaning "junk".

Of course, I knew this while bidding on the auction. It's part of the charm of doing something with the device. Worse case to come, it would be possible to gut the device and slap a Raspberry Pi Zero W2 in it.

I have to note that Japanese are prone to classify a product as junk faster, and it's not yet clear to me how broken the device is as pictures of the device show that it's in decent condition. In the description the seller stated that "クリーニング無し、動作未チェックのジャンク商品（故障品）です。" meaning that it has not been cleaned or checked and that it's just a junk item (malfunctioning product). Also worth noting is that the harddrive has been taken out (HDD取り出し済です).

Right now, I am still in the information gathering stage, as the device still has to be delivered to my proxy and shipped to me. I hope to have it with me at the end of this month (July 2022 as of writing).

Specs

• CPU: Intel Atom Z520 @ 1.33Ghz
• Mem: 2 GB DDR2
• GPU: Intel GMA 500
• Display: 1600x768
• HDD: -
• Wireless: Unknown
• Bluetooth: Unknown
• Power: DC 10.5v

The plan is hopefully to run some lightweight distro on it, such as Voidlinux.

The HDD

As stated, the hard drive has been taken out. This could be a little worrying as these Vaios don't have the usual SATA nor IDE interface, but they use a ZIF connector instead. I do hope the seller includes the needed cable for that. Searching the web a little, I came across a Japanese blog by 少年舎さん[1] (Note: the site is in Japanese) where they replaced the M-SATA drive using a ZIF to M-SATA converter. As such, I ordered the same converter from AliExpress[2].

Sony Vaio VPCP11AKJ

Another one I won the auction of, this one is seemingly working.