Re: Sony Vaio VGN-SZ280P: stripped to the chassis
Posted: Sun May 04, 2025 6:49 am
Good info about tlp and other related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDdGK8Z_qzs
This laptop is the king of tiny screws. But it's not that hard to take apart actually.
Got my new (used) Samsung 250GB SSD installed.
Upon boot, I got this error and 2 beeps.
I guess I upset the ancient TPM 1.2 module by replacing the hard drive? Well I was able to move forward by pressing F1.
Then I proceeded to install Mint 64-bit which is the first time this computer has ever executed 64-bit code. It is like 19 years old.
Things were going well until they weren't. I began to get suspicious that the system was not running as smoothly as I expected, though it's hard to gauge performance expectations on a 19 year old laptop running current Linux. Nonetheless, I was onto something.
The short of it was, it was only running on 1 CPU core!! This laptop originally shipped with an Intel Core Duo, which is like a dual core Pentium M, a 32-bit CPU. I upgraded it to a Core 2 Duo T7600 which is a dual core 64-bit CPU. This required flashing the BIOS to the "latest" which supported the opcode stuff. The thought occurred to me that maybe something in the BIOS didn't support executing 64-bit instructions but DID work as a dual core with 32-bit instructions. But I pressed on.
There was no doubt - it was in fact only bringing up 1 core. Super weird.
However, the BIOS was acting weird still. I tried clearing the TPM. Then the option disappeared entirely. It also required me to choose a boot device after I pressed F1. The whole thing was odd. Adam found a thread with a similar issue on a totally different computer and the solution was to reset the BIOS because it got into a corrupted state. As a hail mary, I gave it a shot.
To my absolute shock, this worked!! It has had a slow POST for years this seemed to fix that as well. I wonder if it was running on 1 core in Windows 10 years ago?? Or, it was fine, but after sitting for years with a dead battery and then being used again (plus I started manipulating the TPM settings because it seemed to be hanging the Mint boot sequence up), it got into a corrupted state.
Either way, this is much better.
Camera and fingerprint reader don't work. Probably drivers. Internet says Linux support is hopeless for fingerprint readers. I MAY have to compile a driver for the camera.
I am having more fun with Linux on this Vaio than the HTPC for a number of reasons. I guess the main one is, it's running AND in 64-bit mode against all odds and mostly stuff seems to work. The second one is, it's really just a toy at this point. The HTPC needs to perform a specific task and it is not optimized for that yet (but is getting there I guess). Perhaps the third reason is, the Vaio was just sitting in the corner doing nothing. It DID have a fully functional Windows 10 but it wasn't that enjoyable to use. This gives me a reason to use it again and I still think it's a cool machine. With the HTPC, I had a fully functional (Windows 7) media center that actually still performed the deprecated tasks perfectly, and in a way that Mint + Kodi is still not able to do. I guess it is doing better than I expected but it's going to take more horsing around with perhaps another Linux distro to hopefully close some of the major remaining gaps. It feels more like work and the Vaio is fun, because using it at all exceeds expectations. It'a all about the expectations.
That said, I think the purpose of the Vaio now is to get some time with Mint as a desktop (laptop) OS to evaluate it for general computing tasks. I may need to buy another battery so I can use it on my lap for reasonable amounts of time. I have other batteries somewhere but it may not be worth looking for them.