Upgraded my Sony S
It’s only been a few months since I had my Sony VAIO S series but I started to feel the 1GB ceiling. Yes, 1GB is a lot memory in general…but it’s not a lot of memory when you’re using Photoshop and Illustrator programs (and not even simultaneously). My latest photoshop projects are simply eating up memory like crazy and I start swapping pretty quickly. Below is an example of the my typical memory usage using my S. Swapping easily starts to happen on my increasingly complicated Photoshop projects so the upgrade was very welcome.
With that in mind, I found a company called Swissbit manufacturing the PC2700 172-pin microDIMMs in 1GB capacities. Another local company called Portable One that had them in stock so I decided to do the upgrade.
The RAM modules were curious since they have a black coating over the modules that I’ve never seen before. I wonder if they help to dissipate heat or block any sort of interference. At any rate, they work splendidly and my system is humming along very happily.
Even though Sony “says” that you can only put 1GB of memory in the S, it is possible to put in 2GB since the chipset supports it. The most likely reason they don’t advertise 2GB support (at least initially) was that the modules are very rare right now and not a mass produced item. At any rate, the price of these modules are less than the price of a Sony branded 512MB module so I’m pretty happy. I do have some other upgrades planned already for my notebook which include Seagate’s forthcoming 7200RPM 100GB 2.5” HDD. Yes, I already have 80GB but it’s filling up fast and that added speed boost will be nice. I’m still not sold on a CPU upgrade since my 1.7Ghz is more than fast enough now. They’re only at 2.1GHz at the top right now so I’m relatively close. I even toyed with the idea of finding a Pentium M 1.1GHz ULV chip to stick in my S so that it would run cooler and longer. Yes, it would be a couple steps down in performance but my needs aren’t that great…unless I’m playing games.
