A Japanese Sony Vaio TR2/B.

November 28, 2003 at 9:43 pm · Filed under Tech

As I mentioned a while ago, my old laptop went and died on me and I bought a replacement: A Sony Vaio TR2/B. Let me tell you, this thing is beautiful. There were two equivalent models for sale, a TR2/P and TR2/B - the P having Windows XP Professional installed, and the former having the Home edition preinstalled. Japanese version of course. And that’s about where the trouble started.

I figured I’d save a few hundred dollars by getting the Home version, since it has the exact same system specs. The baseline for the system:

  • 1GHZ Pentium M.
  • 400 MHZ front side bus.
  • 256 megabytes of RAM.
  • 40 gigabyte hard disk.
  • Two external USB ports (and strangely enough two internal ones).
  • Built-in CD-RW/DVD-ROM Matshita UJDA755 drive, with 24 speed burning. It’ll read DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, and DVD-RW as well.
  • 802.11a/b/g wireless network card.
  • Standard 10/100baseT ethernet card.
  • Bluetooth.
  • Memory stick slot.
  • Firewire.
  • Motion eye camera, built into the top of the monitor.
  • A 16:9 aspect monitor running at 1280×768 pixels with some wacky XBRITE technology..
  • Dual graphics chipsets, so you can extend your desktop onto an external monitor (as opposed to just cloning it). The chipset is an Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME.
  • Semi-decent Intel 3D graphics accelerator.
  • Single PCMCIA slot.
  • Modem.

So needless to say, that wasn’t nearly enough RAM to run Windows XP. I found a shop near where I bought it in Akihabara that sold me a 512 megabyte stick of MicroDIMM RAM. Accessory shopped (eventually) and also grabbed the extended battery (approximately 9 hours!!) and a carrying case.

So Tani found me, at a duty-free shop, a boxed version (legit!) of Windows XP Professional. Which I paid for - ugh. Anyways, once I got the system and the OS I rushed home to play with the new toys.

I booted it once into the Japanese XP Home Edition, made sure it worked correctly, and then promptly formatted the entire drive to install XP Pro Service Pack 1. It installed quite well - keyword being installed. On first boot, pretty much nothing whatsoever in the system was detected - no network card, no modem, no firewire, no wireless, no correct keyboard, hell, even the monitor had the incorrect resolution.

Needless to say I was pissed, but no biggie. Just download the drivers! With what? My busted machine? And how to copy them over? Punched cards? Fuck.

Now let me explain this - in my mind, any name-brand system should be able to run Windows without the nine million bullshit programs that are installed by the factory. No Sony Network Capture application, no thousand fucking tray icons. I want none of that. It would make sense to me that any system you find can run with a clean install of Windows, plus additional drivers downloaded.

Maybe that was the case. So I started hunting for a driver CD in the box. There was none. OK, I’ll do a restore - no restore disc. What the fuck? No driver disc, no recovery disc, nadda. I’m tearing my hair out while staring at the sticker on the machine that says “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP”. Bullshit!

The next day (and I didn’t sleep well) I went to the Sony Center in Ginza. A nice lady that spoke English sorta well on the tech support floor sat me down and tried to help me. I explained to her I wiped the drive and installed XP Pro, and the shit don’t work. “Can you give me a driver CD?” I asked.

“Sure, one moment please.” A few minutes later she comes back with an external CD-ROM drive to sell me. I knew from then on that this transaction would not work in my favor.

Once she understood my problem, she explained to me that there are no CDs because you’re expected to burn your own recovery CDs when you get the computer. It would take 8. Holy shit, I thought. Great!

“Can you give me a recovery CD? Cause I fucked it up.”

“We can try to load from the recovery partition…” she says.

“Nah, that’s gone. I erased it. I paid for a 40 gig drive, not 40 minus 8 gigs for restoration.”

“Oh. Well, um. We don’t have recovery CDs, but you can order one through the mail.”

Logically here I’m the asshole. I know that of course. But seriously, is it even legal to not bundle a computer with at lease the OS? Come on! I paid for a copy of Windows XP Home Edition, and I don’t even have the media for it.

I left the Sony Center in a fit of rage, probably swearing at the poor girl. I was pretty pissed at Sony, and I knew I couldn’t just out and return this thing since we got a huge discount for paying in cash. Warranty yes, refunds no.

And what’s worse is that I wanted to use this machine so, so much. I had spent like six hours in the same Sony shop just fucking with it. It is much too cool just to throw out of my seventh floor apartment.

So eventually I got it working, and here’s how. One of my coworkers had a USB drive, a little keychain puppy that held like a hundred megs or such. Luckily, the drive used the standard USB mass storage scheme and required no extra drivers. I immediately went to Sony USA’s website and downloaded every single driver for the American TR2/AP - and… Success! It worked like a fucking charm.

Every driver installed perfectly with no bullshit utilities piggybacking on them, so now I have a nice clean Windows XP Professional system. The only thing not working is the little “Motion Eye” camera - which realistically I don’t give a damn about.

Now you’d think that they’d just burn the 20 megabytes of drivers on a CD for customers here - or hell, shove them on an MD stick! But no, they don’t. And they don’t even offer driver downloads on the Japanese website.

So that’s my story. The morale is nothing every works easily for me, especially when technology is concerned. Actually, I think the amount of difficulty involved in a task for me is directly proportional to the amount of money spent.

Sony Vaio TR2/B

29 Comments »

  1. Ron said,

    November 28, 2003 @ 11:54 am

    Nice recovery… It’d suck to have a $2,500 paperweight.

  2. Luke said,

    November 28, 2003 @ 11:56 am

    Yes, but on another level it would totally rule ;-)

  3. derek said,

    November 28, 2003 @ 12:41 pm

    I’m pretty sure that a reseller must provide you with hardcopy’s of all software bundled on the machine. How else are you supposed to prove that you’re licensed for said software?

    I also find it strange that XP didn’t detect any of the hardware on a built for XP machine. Believe, I’ve installed 100’s of these, on varying manufacturers (IBM, Dell, Compaq/HP, and yeah, even Sony) and aside from a few driver quirks, I’ve never had any problems.

    Weird. Not that I’m touting XP or anything, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of problems like this.

    Glad to see you got it working though.

  4. Ryan said,

    November 28, 2003 @ 4:33 pm

    It would have been nice if they at least used a network card that is suported natively.

  5. James Spencer said,

    November 28, 2003 @ 11:04 pm

    Yeah. Compaq doesn’t ship recovery CDs (Not that I’d ever buy a Compaq). They want a $15? money order to mail you one. Same sort of hardware nightmare, and this it on their desktop PCs. Remember when a PC was a PC? When, heaven forbid, you could buy one, and clean install an OS on it? I think the only option left is to build your own if you want to vanilla install Windows (or Linux) on it; and that only works on desktops. . . Ahhh, remember the good old days!

  6. ucblockhead said,

    November 29, 2003 @ 9:10 am

    Basically, Microsoft wants to discourage non-factory OS installs because of piracy while the hardware vendors want to discourage it because it makes it harder to support driver issues. The end result is that the customer often gets a second rate install.

    (And yes, I think Sony is the worst at loading all kinds of crap you don’t need at the factory.)

  7. Luke said,

    November 29, 2003 @ 9:16 am

    ucblockhead: Hey, didn’t you work for Sony? ;-) I do agree about preloaded bullshit though. Sony is probably the worst. No, scratch that - Compaq was the worst before the merger although HP might redeem them.

    What pissed me off the most is the excellent North American model support (drivers for download, bundled recovery discs) and absolutely no online or offline support here. I mean, I’m in Japan and this is Sony for Christ’s sake.

    Derek: Yeah, that surprised me as well. XP Pro Service Pack 1, and basically nothing worked out of the box.

    James: It’s ironic is how everyone talks about the nightmare of installing Linux, when the same people claiming it’s difficult have never tried to clean install Windows.

  8. Servus said,

    December 24, 2003 @ 4:36 am

    I have just returned from Tokyo. Purchasng the TR2/B was one of the main goals on my visit there. I even brought with me brand new Win XP Pro on CDs. As soon as I got back to Hilton (they have high speed internet for free and I assumed I need it for Win updates) I have deleted partitions and installed Win XP Pro English. All I have got were four days of staring at perfectly dead (ok, deaf, mute and blind - not dead) $2,250 machine :( Big thanks to you for providing details on solving the problem. I was afraid of using drivers for US model since it does not have Bluetooth and 802.11g (I certainly do not need AirH in USA and Europe). By the way, how much have you paid for the memory upgrade? Because every shop in Akihabara was selling memory for twice the price of crucial.com.

  9. Luke said,

    December 28, 2003 @ 2:24 am

    Servus: Can’t remember what I paid for the RAM upgrade but it was pretty cheap, about the same price at the time in the States/Canada. The trick in Akihabara is to find the shops in the side streets, and just write down what you want to buy (since the workers can usually read much more English than understand by ear).

  10. doobs said,

    January 9, 2004 @ 9:50 am

    Shit that made me laugh! Guess it’s the being there doing that factor. I just bought a PCG-Z1V/P. Burned the XP pro recovery disks, scrapped the nihongo and installed debian linux with english XP pro running on a native partition in VMWARE. That was ok but, but sound and USB support thru vmware was pretty crappy.
    So I reinstalled XP english on the native partition in dual boot mode, and found that absolutely friggin nuthin worked! luckily most of the drivers from the US site for the VAP model work for this too. But where I’m screwed is the wireless LAN. Its a new Atheros card not in the US models and trying to extract it out of the recovery CDs is impossible.
    I tried sony support and they pointed me to this terrific page
    http://search.vaio.sony.co.jp/faq/S0301070012411/index.html
    which basically says “before you scrap your OS, you can extract the drivers from the recovery partirion and save them”.
    Its a bit bloody late now!
    zannen da ne!

  11. geekgeek said,

    January 28, 2004 @ 10:09 pm

    I bought the TR2A here in the States. I love the machine, but am just off my rocker about this recovery partition. I went through the whole hassle of burning 10 disks, and at the end, there was NO OPTION OF RECOVERING THE PARTITION as promised!!! What can I do to safely recover those precious gigs now?!?! Thanks for any guidance/instructions.

  12. Luke said,

    January 29, 2004 @ 12:37 am

    geekgeek: I have no idea. I formatted and installed Windows from scratch. That’s one option that I usually don’t recommend though.

  13. James said,

    February 13, 2004 @ 9:51 pm

    Just would like to add my own opinion here. How can you blaim Windows XP for not having drivers for hardware that didn’t even exist when it was writen? Of course when you put Windows XP onto the TR it’s not going to reconise most of the hardware, it’s brand new.

    Yes some machines are different but only because they use technology which was around when Windows XP was written. For instance LAN and modem chipsets which were around when Windows XP was designed are still in use on occasions.

    It is a complex process to install all the drivers for a Sony machine manually but that is the point of an installed OS and restore partition, the average user cannot do this themselves.

    Personally I don’t think Sony bundle a lot of unneeded stuff with their machines, I’ve seen much much worse. The programs that load on bootup are required to fully control the advanced features of the laptop, the other stuff which is bundled you load or don’t load as you need it. It generally all gels together really pretty well.

    Also it’s not just Sony that don’t provide the disks for their machines but most major OEM’s these days. I agree that getting you to burn so many CD’s and using the HDD to store the recovery partition on is extremely bad. I know the days of getting a Windows CD are gone but they should provide this on their own CD’s or DVD’s supplied with the machine. It’s a serious waste of HDD space in my opinion.

  14. diederik said,

    February 24, 2004 @ 3:31 am

    by jove
    what a story
    i’m in tokyo myself at the moment and it didn’t take me long to find out japanese laptop models are quite a bit cheaper then theyre export collegues. Which left me doubting and not knowing what to do for the last 5 days, since none of the salesman - if they speak any english at all, can tell me wether i’m gonna have problems or not.
    I know a bit about computers but i’m no pro, far from it, I did bring XP english version with me on a cd though.
    I’d buy a toshiba CX or Sharp Mebius or NEC LaVIe… Ah if you could just tell me, would be so easy. YES or NO? Should I go for a Jap or not? See, I really don’t know anymore, and internet is only available to me at 500yen per hour so don’t have much time to do a lot of net-research…

    Whatever - wish you and the Vaio all the best,
    d

  15. Luke said,

    February 24, 2004 @ 3:40 am

    diderik: No. If you want to spend a disturbing amount of time fucking around with your system, by all means buy one from Japan - I did. But if you have anything better to do with your time then um, don’t.

  16. Daryl said,

    March 21, 2004 @ 1:21 pm

    OK I CANT ORDER A RECOVERY DISK CAUSE I’M IN CANADA SO I’M PISSED.. ANYONE KNOWS THE LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING RECOVERY WIZARD?

  17. Pingla said,

    May 9, 2004 @ 6:20 am

    If you guys had actually done your homework you would not have had any problems. On the first partition of the disk all drivers are located nicely in a directory. Simply mount this partition in windows, and burn it to a CD. Then you will have all the necessary drivers when you reinstall windows.

    No problem at all!

  18. Cagri said,

    May 9, 2004 @ 6:32 pm

    Hi all,
    Does anyone have information on where I can find a patch to get rid of the DVD region coding on my TR3AP? I have done that before on my desktop with a different DVD rom, but cannot find the patch for ‘Matshita UJDA 755′

  19. michel said,

    May 27, 2004 @ 9:46 am

    bought mine in uk it came with recovery disk!

  20. Eddie said,

    May 29, 2004 @ 4:35 am

    I have a sony PCG-Z1V/P and need an English driver for the wirless lan. Has anyone got one
    ?

  21. Jun said,

    June 21, 2004 @ 8:16 am

    I bought mine in China and it comes with built-in CHINESE VERSION of Windows XP Home-ed I changed it to ENGLISH VERSION of Windows XP Professional-ed… and what happens is that the camera doesn’t work although the driver is already installed successfully… the NETWORK SMART CAPTURE also doesn’t work… I need some help guys… I found some hotfix817589 but it says the language is not the same so i cannot install this hotfix… HELP ANYONE???

  22. Jeff said,

    June 23, 2004 @ 9:32 am

    Hi,

    I realize I’m coming into your story about 6 months late; but I am trying to do exactly what you’ve done: load up a VAIO with a clean install of Japanese XP Pro. I am also finding NO JP DRIVERS!

    How is the stability of your system with English drivers / Japanese XP Pro ?

    It’s so easy to find complaints on the web about Sony’s lack of basic support and driver availability - unreal!

    Jeff

  23. Luke said,

    June 23, 2004 @ 10:42 am

    Jeff, the English drivers should work just fine with the TR2. If you can’t find them, e-mail me and I’ll try to hook you up.

  24. Felix said,

    July 5, 2004 @ 5:19 am

    thats the page I was looking for. Thanks a lot for all the information, I’m ready now to order my vaio from japan :)

    cheers

  25. Ryan said,

    May 4, 2005 @ 1:31 pm

    Yo- good stuff! I really enjoyed your article coming from a Gajin perspective. Japan rocks! but can be a bitch too.
    So my friend just came back from Japan with a Japanese XP VAIO. Is there a way to change the sucker to display English (control panel etc.)? I assume not, hence the English XP install episode your wrote so amusingly about.
    I can not get it to connect to my AP with 128 bit Encryption or even just Pass trough table set up. It will only connect if the AP is wide open, and that security level wont cut it here in SF.
    Cheers,
    Ryan
    When in doubt- say Nihongo Zen Zen Decki ma sen. Its always good to through a little confusion back at them if you are having a hard time. Some get the joke though, and you have friend in that person.

  26. Luke said,

    May 4, 2005 @ 1:56 pm

    Ryan - no, you can’t change the language to English. Only Windows 2000 with the multi-language pack supports that feature (no idea why they dropped it from XP).

  27. david kohn aka knurd on kall said,

    August 8, 2007 @ 6:08 pm

    THANK YOU

    I am about to embark on the journey you had to stumble through. At first I thought I was totally fucked, butt now… I see, there is cause for hope. thank you so much for your diatribe

  28. Jim Stretchberry said,

    December 2, 2007 @ 3:17 am

    I have my second Vaio PCG TR2A… Overall not a bad experience for this travel laptop… Thank GOD I have desk tops at home and work.. The Motion Eye doesn’t work at all any more and even when it did it was the WORST camera ever made for a computer… Apple engineers should offer some counseling at Sony…

  29. will said,

    May 6, 2008 @ 10:47 pm

    also tearing my hear out. but over a TZ91S model sony.

    this explains the bullshit you have to go thru if you have deleted your recovery parition…

    http://vcl.vaio.sony.co.jp/english/index.html#detail_00

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