Tellyputer

Or to give it its proper name the Sony Vaio TV-PC VGC-V617V a hefty mix of the two, looking like a flat screen TV on steroids complete with a monster base panel.  For the curious there are full specs here at CNET,  its also bundled with a GeForce FX Go 5700 Graphics Card From Nvidia and some Sony SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio as their bundled onboard soundcard.

If you are wondering why I'm making a mention of this now, it was thrown out at work and decided to haul this home as a good replacement of a similarly spec XP machine that drove my scanner and printer. The downsides in this are a few actually, the wireless keyboard and mouse that it came with was absent, but it worked wonderfully with a USB keyboard and mouse also scavenged.  The main draw back is the screen which has some weird graphical corruption due to a hardware fault, its not entirely a deal breaker as its not going to be used everyday, but I don't think its going to be a cheap fix if I do decide to get it looked at. Also its a bastard to get into more later.

For reasons that are entirely my own I decided to put linux on to it to see if Mint would run and the results are universally awful.  We burned a live CD of Mint XFCE as well as Linux Lite and the horrible Damn Small Linux and had the same awful experience with all of them.

Mint took about 40 minutes to initialize from a live CD (Petra) to full on screen corruption and its older incarnation Olivia failed to initalise.  Linux live did the same but giving us a pointer to play with and bugger all else, while DSL just hung at the intro screen.

I haven't tried lube buntu as yet, as I hate the Ubuntu interface but safe to say I don't think it'll work, so its not worth torrenting an iso of this.

I did allude to difficulties getting into the actual back of this as opposed to my old PC that went out of its way to provide ease of opening (and we added Mint without any problems). A picture paints a thousand words as they say.

Hard drive is of course located in the base.

You can see at the top there is a hard drive crammed into the base panel with a few bits and pieces at the back.  The only way in is to remove the base panel and then a small cover.  There is no real way to pull this off without full on demolition and the screws they had covering in this were horrible  and had to be replaced with some old screws from an old hard drive bay.  Its a reasonable 200GB model in there just with no way of getting it out without some violence.

RAM plate cover.

I never did get the back plate off of this to see inside.  Apart from the cover up there and the main cover which needed to be slid up and yanked to reveal a button to come away, undoing all the screws on this had no effect.  It had 512 meg of DDR ram in this and that is about it.  I added my usual care package of malware removers and spec programs  to look over what was on there but apart from some drivers and a clip or two of lesbian porn there was nothing of note.  All the software noted in the top most link was absent apart from MS Office 2003 Student Edition, and that didn't count as I found a boxed copy a few weeks back. 

As I said its a telly as well but with analogue cut off now and the screen as it is I won't be testing this out as it has ports for audio out and a proper aerial port.