PCX Town was a store of personal computers and electronic parts in Osaka, Japan, although it has already gone bankrupt. The computer in this video may have been sold by me, at the time I was an employee there and also sold this model well, SONY VAIO was a relatively high-end brand and was bought by a rich man. I think, at that time, relatively reasonable American models had already arrived, so we were buying such models, because it was a cheap monthly salary. I made a comment because the name of a nostalgic store came out.

In case anyone didn't know about the beauty of the VAIO logo (it's one of the best hidden meaning tech logos). If I remember correctly the philosophy behind the VAIO line was Sony passing from analog into digital (that is why there is a lot of media stuff on the PC). The VA is a sine wave (analog), the IO is binary (1/0, digital). Cool video, I love old Sony stuff.

“They put this back together well” lolol you have no idea. I once ordered a two volume biography of Buddha from a religious publisher in Japan. Even though the volumes together were selling for 400usd used, they sold both to me for like 40usd total and when they got to me I was amazed. I have never seen someone use common packing and shipping materials and make it look nicer than any present I’ve ever gotten for Christmas or my birthday in my entire life. Japanese are just amazing sometimes.

When Clint is so comfortable in Windows 98 that he can navigate it in a foreign language.

I just love that the VAIO wallpaper says "digital dream". That's so vapourwave.

Two things I've noticed after living in Tokyo for over 15 years; 1) second hand stuff tends to be in waaaay better condition than you'd typically expect in the west. 2) People tend to leave the stickers on everything,; shower heads, cookers, taps, electronics etc.

Hey Clint, just a warning about the CMOS battery, they are NiMH and they will leak. I have the model immediately prior to the 777 and it's CMOS battery leaked pretty severely. Just thought you might want to know this

For anyone who owns one of these: The performance issues with the last game are most likely due to lack of (or outdated) DirectX/DirectDraw runtime. This was a separate download from Microsoft (or often can be found on the game CD in a separate folder for manual install) and did not come with graphics chip drivers. If DirectDraw fails to load the game probably falls back to using GDI for graphics, and the performance of GDI is always terrible regardless of CPU or graphics chip spec.

Windows 9x laptops just hit different, there's a sense that we are still in the wild west days of portable computing, and so many things seem familiar to modern standards, but entirely weird at the same time.

I use to work at a pc repair shop and loved working on Vaio's. Something about the esthetics that really were pleasing to me.

*Even though PCs are so powerful and awesome now, I have much fonder memories of the good old stuff* 😫

Moved to Japan in ‘02 and remember checking out Vaios at shops like Yodobashi and Bic Camera during my weekly visits (they had SO much tech on display). Vaios were almost always the most expensive laptops available. Definitely nice to look at though!

0:11 "Show physicial evidence of my increasing lack of impulse control when it comes to buying computers from Japan" I can relate. On a whim I just bought a hand full of non working Dell XPS 8700 (Haswell) computers on ebay just to see if I can restore them to their orginal 2015 glory... Success!!

Gotta love LGR for using "Duke Nukem 3D" as a benchmark for nearly everything on existance.

This was my first laptop. A hand-me-down. With it’s cracked hinge which turned all blacks to greens on the display, dead charging mechanism and lack of a few key caps I still loved it to death ❤️

It's amazing that a computer this old is still in such great shape. Even with stickers looking new.

When I think of Sony in the 90s and 2000, I always think of the incredible amount of bloatware and background processes they had.

"Clippy is a dolphin in Japan" had me rolling

“It’s a Sony”

9:28 The connector for the external Floppy drive looks so much like the original PlayStation memory card and the controller connector - the rounded edges and wavy bits that act as a bit of a grip especially. Sony just had this distinct design language and it's neat to see it extend to their other products as well.

I remember these things were the coolest laptop you could own for a time. I was in college at the time and these things were as futuristic, sleek, and modern as you could get.

Im starting to feel old, Seeing that a laptop made my senior year of High School is considered antique and we are amazed that it still works.. LOL

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug ;) Where do you keep all these gems, I imagine you having a tech-warehouse or something :D Thanks for another great video Clint! Enjoy your (easter)weekend!

That computer is in excellent shape. Most computers from this era that I see are just beat up.

My first ever laptop was a Sony VAIO PCG-747. It cost a lot of money over here in the UK. £2000+. This video was a proper nostalgia trip for me. 👍

Dear lord that Vaio startup sound really dug up some childhood memories The first laptop I had was a Vaio with windows XP, and I had it from the mid 2000's to early 2010's I remember staying up late to watch some of the first Minecraft Skyblock lets plays on that thing

wow mate, either you can read Japanese or youve spent far too long in the windows 98 environment ! good work !

Sony really just hits the randomizer button when naming their products, eh?

I have the -same laptop except in a lower spec configuration- predecessor to this laptop! It's a PCG-719. It has the MMX 233MHz and 1024x768 panel, but I got it with 128MB (maximum amount), so I'm not sure what the original RAM amount was. I got it essentially in pieces, it was very worn and used up. Such a cool laptop, except the hinge is very fragile due to the aging plastic. I had to 3D print replacement corners for the plastic base of the laptop to glue (using JB weld) to the back and hold the hinges together. The laptop worked great after all the work I put into it, but a year and a half ago, the backlight inverter died. Other than that, it could open basic webpages including Wikipedia with a PCMCIA wifi adapter. I also bought a NOS 3rd party battery for it on ebay that gave the laptop 5-6 hours of use. Someday, I will try to fix that inverter. It's a very cool and interesting laptop. There is very little information online about it, and finding replacement parts is basically impossible, so it made me get creative to fix it up.

Cool video! And I gotta say - either Clint knows Japanese, or he knows Windows 98 by heart, or he's running a realtime visual translation... All of these are equally impressive.

I love that greyish-lavender plastic Sony used on a lot of Vaio products. They were aesthetically next level.

29:39 There's actually a whole community trying to revive SAPARi! They were able to hack the evaluation version of the server software to remove its limitations. You can actually connect to it by editing the URL in the various .wrl files to their servers, and they have a very active and ongoing Discord server if you'd like to join in!

I just love vintage computer stuff. Thank you so much for continuing to make these videos, its always the highlight of my day.

Gosh, this brought back so many memories. I moved to Tokyo in '98 and those VAIO models were always the holy grail for me seeing them on display everywhere a few years after my arrival

I had the old Sony Vaio C1 series and the UX Micro PC, they were great. I miss the innovations and creative ideas Sony used to have with their engineers.

I love that the closed captioning calls Clint's laugh, "[goofy chuckling]"!

That floppy disk reader is incredibly slick, love the colors.

The way you ended the video in sync with the maze screensaver was very satisfying.

tysm for posting lgr! this made my birthday much more happier 🥺❤️

The brand knew the perfect shade of purple to use in their design.

39:42 You even picked Asuka Honda's birthday to upload the video, well done!

I swear, time is weird. First I see Cathode Ray Dude do a video on a VAIO camera laptop, and then suddenly like a day after I watch the video, LGR gets a VAIO laptop too, hah.

I super appreciate you letting us see the end of the Windows Maze at the end. Very satisfying when that happens.

Early!! I have a Sony Vaio desktop running XP as part of my retro gaming space in the basement. Its a VGC RB30 with a 3ghz Pentium 4 HT. Unfortunately somebody toke the factory graphic card and TV tunner/video/audio in card that it would've come with. I've done some retrofitting to it since the machine is no longer stock. I'm also missing all the software Refit upgrades Original 420watt PSU replaced with a new old stock DAYNEX 500 watt PSU Maxed to 4gb DDR ram Installed a ATI sapphire Radeon HD 3650 (the 512mb dual dvi model) Creative Labs Audigy SE with the EAX 4.0 software patch 500gb Seggate HDD (its old and getting warn loud bearings but still works) Edit 2 add Finally found a pci usb 2.0 card for it, yea four more usb ports!(Seriously needed them)

This is what charlie puth watches at night

I was there for all of 1999, and while I agree the Vaio had some cool ideas and this was certainly a fun review of it, I feel if I spilled 3 grand on any computer that chugged that bad on a 2D game, 1999 me would have popped a blood vessel.

My parents got me a VAIO PCG-FX103 in 2001 for college. It's STILL going.

The old VAIOs were great!

Vaio laptops were just the coolest in the late 90s/early 00s. Every one was totally out of my price range of course, they were just things I saw in magazines and wanted.

Now THIS is the Sony I remember!

It's hard to believe how many new old stock there is still out there. I realize this is used, but I still find it amazing how well preserved this machine is, over 20 years!

1999 March.... Getting my first Playstation... so many memories!

I like getting stuff from Japan. They take pretty good care of their stuff and/or do some minor restorations before they ship their used products out. It's nice.

Woah, that screensaver ended perfectly with the video, noice.

How serendipitous to see a Vaio video today, cause I just got a PCG-505 on eBay yesterday - also from 1999! I think it's kinda like this one, just shrunk down a little and with a 333 MHz Celeron! Really excited to get it in and compare it with this Japanese beauty~!

this era of laptops is so fascinating with the whole expansion card "boom" I remember my dad freaking out about wireless cards for his 1999 Hitachi Laptop

There’s no higher delight to watch a review of a classic Vaio. I miss so much this machines. Thanks for sharing!

39:40 how nice of you to release this on Asuka's birthday! 27:50 "Year of 1997" sounds like Dr. Steve Brule

Awesome video!!!. I feel the same joy when i play with my Thinkpad 770X that i bought from a guy in Germany, those are really portable time machines, greeting from Colombia Mr.LGR!

Funny you posted this today because I got a box from Japan full of stuff for a project. This video has convinced me to buy more stuff. Damn you, Clint.

I need to get my hands on those midi files.

I love the Sony design from this time period. I always wanted one but didn’t have the money for a computer back then, let alone a Sony one.

You have no idea how much I love you for ending the video on the completion of the maze screensaver

Nice laptop with good port locations. Some of the later Vaios had the ports near the bottom right where they perfectly interfered with external mouse movements.

I had this exact machine (slightly different model number)! I bought it in 1999 at CompUSA. It lasted a year before exhibiting charging problems. The repair shop could not fix it as Sony refused to sell spare parts for it and Sony refused to cover it under warranty.

So-Net is an ISP that is still around in Japan, fully owned by Sony. :)

My first laptop was the Vaio Z600 LEK - fully loaded and around £2000 I think in 99/00 - I’d just started working as a programmer and was buying my first house. Sold all my desktop machines and all the accessories to downsize to a single portable. That was the last time I owned a desktop as a daily until last summer! What a great machine and way ahead of Apple at that time. I eventually replaced it with the Apple Titanium PowerBook a few years later. This video brings back memories of my first unbox and setup.

The illustration on that pod box brings me back to the days of walking up and down the pc games aisle at Media Play, picking out a game with my birthday money basing the choice on only the description and screenshots on the back.

Back in 98-99 I spent so much time playing o.g. doom and jazz on an older ibm laptop running windows 95. This thing would of been so fancy with it's Win 98 AND a cd-rom drive. :D

hey clint, speaking of early vr/metaverse places. do you remember ACTIVE WORLDS ? it was a vr meeting place in the mid 90s and you could build your own house, that you had to go to a building supply place and get materials. it was pretty amazing for the time.

oh man that VAIO startup chime at 15:18 brought back memories i didn't even know i had

my mom had a similar looking one back in the day. was pretty cool to play around with the internet (which we never really understood before).

Been binging another kind of old technology myself lately, watching the full run of the computer chronicles over the last few months... ever thought about trying to get an interview or something with Stewart Cheifet? From what I can gather the man is still relatively active in the tech sphere at the age of 83!

Finally something worthy of my mobile data quota while @ the cabin for easter 😃 🐣🌞🗿

A laptop from my birthyear! It's been awhile Clint since I've perused your LGR retrotech reviews

This is my favorite laptop. Just, like, one of my favorite objects that exists on this earth. Thank you so much for making this video.

H e l l Y e a h My first laptop was a PCG-K15! Love me some VAIO content, Clint! Killer stuff~

I've definitely noticed that Japanese people seem far more likely to keep the original box and everything in it than we do in the West. I think 4 of my Librettos came with the original box and most if not all of the contents (albeit not all pristine), and I know it isn't that uncommon with other listings from private sellers either. But then I've also seen some commercial sellers list up laptops that are so heavily destroyed that most Western sellers would just scrap them completely, not even being worth parting out. This PCG-777 is clearly the distant ancestor of the 2002-era PCG-FX601 that was the very first retro laptop I got working, a laptop I have very fond memories of but one that sadly died when its IDE controller decided to object to a hard drive swap and stopped working properly. I replaced it with an FX805 or something like that, but it isn't the same. What I've never understood about Sony laptops is their inconsistency when it comes to voltages. With Sony, they're either 16V or 19V - but bizarrely the two would co-exist all the way from the 1990s to at least the late 2000s, meaning you're never quite sure exactly which laptop will use which voltage. At least most share the same connectors within the voltage, with a few exceptions, and the 16V Sony bricks are generally identical to Fujtisu ones as well. Meanwhile, I've used a 19V Sony power supply for my monitor for many years now, as it was cheaper and stronger than the original LG unit and far better built!

I love the intro! 🥚🐇🐣 Happy Easter! 🐣🐇🥚

The grey and purple SONY VAIO colors brings back nostalgia from 2001.......we had a Pentium III machine which was a huge step up from our previous 1996 PC

I found for the removing sticky things where adhesives were (e.g. where the old feet were) that lighter fluid or anything with naphtha in it works great

I'm surprised by all the paper documentation. Most of my exposure with laptops of that era were with business oriented systems, that shipped with much less extra documentation.

34:00 Great "Oldtimer vs. Technology"-impression, Clint!

In 1998, I had a VAIO desktop and I remember that VAIO wallpaper and those start up sounds and the Windows 98 demo music. I saved the wallpaper and the cool music video and demo videos it came with and have them still on my current hard drive. The Matrox Mystique G200 was an excellent graphics chip as well and they bundled a fun game called Motorhead with it. I guess that Matrox was the first to handle 32-bit color 3D for PC games. VAIOs were the coolest back then!

I approve of Clint's increasing lack of impulse control. Hehehe..

The 90's was the best decade. Its not even a hot take. They were fkn awesome 😪

I worked at a Circuit City in the very early 00s and always lusted after the VAIO gear. Sony paid a lot of attention to detail with this design. The pale purplish blue and the wavy plastic "mmmmm" .

I've got a PCG-N505ES (ultra-portable Pentium II, also from 1999) a while ago and I can totally share the same feeling about them. Sony used to make great laptops, and this generation have a special place in my heart.

Want to share some experience with similar models. The first job I worked I had to setup und support hundreds of the PCG series notebooks looking almost identically to this one. Interrestingly almost no one of the users removed those "feature-stickers" beneath the keyboard. As a result, they grab all the dirt and other "substances" typically in an office and were absolutely gruesome when we got them back for re-setup or destroy.... Also those flaps on the back were notorious for breaking the first two or three years of use. The battery also was not the best but with the option to use a second battery instead of using the floppy drive/cd-rom drive, also business-users were happy :) But besides of these things this VAIO series was one of the most durable Notebooks I've ever worked on. Love to see such a thing (and hear this boot-up sound) in one of your videos :)

What a beauty! Looks like it's been hardly used. I wonder why Sony didn't get into ruggedised laptops as they seem pretty lucrative for Panasonic. Seems like a massive missed opportunity there

First Cathode Ray Dude’s awesome Sony camcorder laptop thingy video and now this. Awesome! Sending ❤️ from Seattle to WNC.

My first laptop was a Sony VAIO PCG-FX370 (model PCG-992L) Notebook and it looks almost exactly like this version. I just went and dug in my office closet and its still in my old laptop bag from college, with all the recovery CD's as well.

I've always left the stickers on my laptops in the past, never been too sure 'if I'm meant to remove them' or not. Think only exception is one netbook had it peel off over time on its own

omg duke nukem 3d, this brought back so many good memories; i remember downloading the demo off of happypuppy on a 56k modem overnight with my bro and my parents were flipping out. we got away with it and it launched me into the world of gaming as we know it now. thank you so much for making this video, the nostalgia it hath brought is tearing at my heartstrings xoxo

Ahh Vaio... I had a Sony Vaio VGN-N31M back in 2008, good memories.

Nice to see one of these in such great shape Normally this age of laptop would end up in a junk shop like Hard Offs bargain bucket .. I'm sure that keyboard wasn't used but external one.. great find

1990s Japanese computers like this always remind me of Serial Experiments Lain

A surprisingly good screen for the era. The laptops I had from the same time had much *much *MUCH* worse screens with extremely horribly blacks and tons of backlight bleed.

Been watching you for years now love old computers.

Finally caught up to the most recent LGR videos.