OK I am a mess in this situation! I bought the UX and I got a bad one. The wifi connection is horrible and the tmobile or cingular modem/sim didnt work. So it is going back and I dont think i am going to get another one. I am going to wait for a while.
My real problem is my tr2ap3 has been giving me trouble and I was SO excited to be getting a new cpu but now i am not keeping the UX I wanted to stick with the TR for a while longer. I decided to do a DVD Factory Reinstall and here is where my nightmare begins! It took me 4 hours to do the reinstall and then the updates from MS and SP2 but in the middle of SP2 I got a BSOD and then when the TR rebooted it said No operating System can be found. I was like WTF so I went to bed that was 3am last night. Got up at 8am and started over again this time at about 2pm I got through SP2 and all. I then loaded up MS Office and somehting got hung up there then F___ing A I got a BSOD and then the reboot to No operating System can be found HOLY F_______ Sh______t. I feel like jumping out the window now!
I hit f2 at Vaio screen and go into BIOS and then it booted correctly but every hour or so I get a BSOD now. I dont know what to do? Is this software related or hardware related? I have a call into SOny. I think its the hard drive!
Should I
(a) reinstall again ?
(b) get sony to give me a new hard drive? would they install sp2 for me since it keeps messing up?
(c) buy a new CPU not the UX something else? if so what? small but i need more powerful then the tr2?
(d) give up on technology and dig a bunker in the ground spending my time stocking up on essentials?
(e) dont fully give up on technology and just go back to my childhood days and try to get by using a TI speak and spell for my day 2 day computing needs?
Rabbit, you most likely have one of three problems, in order of most to least likely:
- bad hard drive
- bad RAM
- bad mother board
If you have two sticks of RAM in your TR, RAM is easy enough to check. Just use one or the other for a while and see if you still have the same problems. If it’s the hard drive, you will most likely hear a knocking coming from the drve as it tries to access the platter. It will be different from the click you hear from time to time as thehard drive arm parks.
Sorry to hear that your UX didn’t work out. You’re definitely right about the UX having less wifi range than the TR. Here in my apt I can only see 3 networks with the UX compared to 6 on my TR (I’ve seen up to 15 on occasion). On the other hand, the UX connects to my WPA network faster and more reliably than any other wireless cdevice I’ve ever had.
Drachen, THANKS for the info. I have a gig of ram so i think its two pieces. I have never opened the TR up. I do hear a click sound from the drive so maybe it is the drive. I am not sure why the problem really starts to happen during or after an SP2 install though.
I will see what sony says. They replaced my mother board and thr hard drive once already.
jefn thanks i will check the dirt issue as well. it doesnt feel hotter then normal though.
As far the UX goes the thing is SO SWEET but I want it to be more powerful overall (I know I know) what do I want the thing is tiny. I wish I could get it again but I am going to wait for the next round.
Not sure if I wait to have sony fix the TR or go and buy another lappy? Not sure what to buy anyways.
the UX50 definately suffers in wifi range. I can get signal everywhere in my house but where the TR (and the powerbook) got half bars the UX gets 1 and sometimes loses the sig and has to hunt a bit.
Why not get yourself a T series or a TX? I always felt it was the logical upgrade from the TR.
japaneseimportscomau my UX180 got 1 bar sitting on the rotuer.
yeah the TX looks great! The problem is I recently had a baby and now I am doing alot of video and I dont think it can handle it. The TR cannot for sure. I want something super small and super powerful but its not available yet I guess. Maybe I should do a TX and a desktop as well.
Unfortunately, you’re not going to get a lot of power in small packages with portables. The smaller ones tend to be geared towards battery life (even my UX only gets around 2 hours with intense wifi usage). On the other hand, a lot of us on the forum have had lots of luck with the T and TR models as far as using them to edit video. It’s recommended that you use an external firewire hard drive and at least 1 GB RAM. Throughput on the internal 1.8” HD sucks. Do a search on the forum. I know gr00vy’s had some say on the matter here.
The TR can handle video editing, the T series can handle video editing, the TX can kick the crap out of video editing.
You will definately need some external storage; a firewire drive or SCSI drive if you want really fast, as you need 7200rpm drives to capture video without losing frames. You may need 512MB of RAM, and you can certainly use 1GB but it’s not essential. It depends on what software you are using.
I’m coming up on 18 years of professional video experience and so starting with tape systems and the early non-linear computer systems I’ve had experience with the lot.
First system, 386DX2-66. Way before pentiums, and we could edit broadcast quality video for television no problems.
Fact: you can edit broadcast quality video and burn a DVD on as little as a pentium 3 with 128MB RAM quite comfortably using an older version of say Premiere, version 5 perhaps (which you’ll probably get for $2 from a garage sale). In fact the system requirements for Premiere 5 are:
For Windows-based computers: an Intel Pentium processor or an MMX processor; Microsoft
Windows 95, Windows or later operating system; RAM: 32MB or 64MB (recommended); and a CD-ROM drive.
Later video editing packages are full of bells and whistles and a faster machine will cut down encoding and rendering time, but frankly if you not on a dealine you can set the renders going overnight for your home movies. Professionals rarely use the bells and whistles. We use fades, dissolves and straight cuts. Watch a television show carefully and apart from some stylised ones (like home improvement or such) they rarely use any funky stuff like clock wipes or checkerboard wipes, etc. They really just look cheap when done on cheap machines (and by cheap I mean anything not professional like Smoke or Flame setups that cost $100,000).
If you want to see something cut on a lower end system, and all the effects done in camera or in an older version of After Effects (man they were long renders I’ll admit), then have a look at this music video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=812616291406639209
Edited on a Pentium III-700 with 256MB of RAM using an external SCSI drive for capture.
thanks thanks thanks! i saw the video. ok so i have more options then i think. i am going to try to get my tr working perfect then hols on to it for a bit. then buy a tx or ux down the road.
i have a sanyo vpc hd1 and when i use ulead to render or convert it brings my tr2 with 1 gig of ram to its knees afterward. :(
Yes, you can indeed do video on the TR, T or TX without any problems. The main issues are storage and memory. So, you’ll definitely want at least 1GB of memory and fast voluminous external storage (preferably through Firewire) if you want to work more smoothly. I think you will find that you can get work done.
[quote author=“sillyrabbitt123”]hey groovyone hope all is well!
Thanks. Should I go with a sony drive or something else?
thanks all!
SR
For an external? It shouldn’t matter. As long as it has a 7200RPM drive inside and a FW interface you should be fine. All the named brand stuff like Seagate or Maxtor should work well.
you know I am in the process of doing the third factory reinstall. So far so good. I am loading up all the MS updates then onto SP2.
I have two sets of recovery DVDs is it possible one set is bad? Because I tried it the first two installs with one set and got MAJOR problems when i tried for the thrid time i got an error in the middle of the reinstall saying I/O error corput install. Now I am using the other set of DVDs and its seems to be working like a charm (finger crossed).
no such luck i thought i was good to go and then my HD started chirping like a chicken and bang BSOD. dont know what the errors mean but the HD sounded BAD.
