An ultra portable HackBook Pro
January 10, 2008
As they say - necessity is the mother of invention, and it was necessity that became the mother of invention for my ultra portable HackBook Pro.
You've probably noticed from the rest of this website that I get up to some pretty strange adventures. I like to take photos and video whenever I'm travelling. I need to keep in contact with back home, and if I can, I try to work whilst I'm away travelling (this allows me to travel further and for longer). Ideally, when I'm travelling I want to be able to make a blog post every few days, as well as uploading some of my photos to Flickr, and maybe even a short video of the previous few days highlights to YouTube.
When I'm travelling for long periods of time I also try to take workshop manuals and parts lists for whatever vehicle I've taken with me - I can then stand a far greater chance of being able to repair my vehicle (or at least arrange to get the correct parts in order to fix it). To meet all of these requirements, I need a laptop. Not just any laptop though, I need something small, light and rugged. It's going to be slung either in a backback, in a saddle bag or somewhere in a jeep. Lots of banging around - ruggedness is essential.
Unfortunately, Apple don't currently make an ultra portable MacBook, let alone one that is any way, shape or form "rugged" (although the old "snow" iBooks I know could take quite a beating). This meant anything in the current Apple line-up was out of the equation, which is a shame as I use 24" iMac as my desktop machine, and love everything about it - iPhoto and Flickr integration is a joy with the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto, authoring of video is a breeze with iMovie, and I can easily search within my PDF vehicle manuals using Yep!
Panasonic make the ToughBook, which seems like a nice piece of kit, but its expensive, large and heavy. All three of those things put me off of this particular machine.
Sony recently released the Viao TZ series. These are cute little ultra portable laptops with a carbon fibre casing, and were rumoured to be the platform that Apple was basing it's own ultra portable upon. It seemed like a logical choice to me - it fit all my needs, and if it WAS the platform Apple would be basing their ultra portable on, getting drivers working shouldn't be too difficult.
I opted for the TZ90 model, which has a 32GB SSD (Solid State Disk) drive, a 160GB HDD and 2GB RAM.
With the carbon fibre casing and SSD drive it's both light (1.2Kg!) and rugged. The laptop boots from the SSD drive, which has no moving parts, so it's very unlikely to get damaged from being knocked around. It's also somewhat quicker to boot from - typically booting from power on in about 20 seconds. Lastly, being solid state it draws a lot less power than a regular hard disk, this is something which is pretty important for a portable. Typically, I'm getting 6 - 7 hours usage from a single charge - try getting that from a regular MacBook 
It has a 160GB hard disk, which is plenty of storage for photos, video, GPS maps and track logs, vehicle manuals etc. This is a regular hard disk, so it can get damaged by knocks, being dropped etc, but as it's not the boot drive, and can be disabled in the BIOS, so it isn't catastrophic if the drive gets damaged. Perhaps a better option would have been the 32GB SSD + DVD drive model, using an iPod as my external hard disk. I think that realistically, I'll be taking an iPod with me and backing up all my data to the iPod regularly - just to be safe.
Before I installed OS X I did some research to find out what peripherals wouldn't or would be unlikely to work. Ofcourse, the SD and Memory Stick DUO card reader was in the list of things that didn't work. I need both of these working in order to transfer data from my camera and camcorder to the laptop. This meant that Windows had to stay. I actually performed the "downgrade" from the supplied Windows Vista Basic to Windows XP Professional. It's now much more stable and responsive. Vista contains nothing that I miss.
I decided to leave Windows XP installed on the SSD drive, installing OS X on the regular hard disk. Unfortunately, the TZ's BIOS doesn't have an option to boot from the regular hard disk, so this meant I'd have to use the Windows boot loader to switch between Operating Systems. No biggy, infact, because I've changed the bootloader to display the boot options for 0 seconds, meaning you need to press F8 to get to the advanced bootloader screen, I've achieved some measure of security through obscurity.
I've installed both MacDrive and XPlay2 into Windows - this makes both my iPod and the HFS+ formatted internal HDD readable to Windows. This is pretty important, the only way I can get data from the camera or camcorder into OS X is to copy from the memory cards in Windows to the HFS+ partition before switching to OS X.
Ofcourse, I've also got both Parallels and VMWare Fusion installed into OS X.
The full photoset shows some size comparisons against DVD cases, as well as some more detailed photos of OS X running.
I'll make a series of posts detailing the process I took to configure this machine, as well as posts describing exactly what components do and do not work (and if I ever get those that don't working, I'll update with instructions of how I managed to get them working).
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6 Responses to “An ultra portable HackBook Pro”
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Hi Lee. Purchased the Sony TZ for similar reasons. The MacBook Air just won’t cut it either. Could you tell me if you were able to get your native screen resolution and wireless working?? Would you be able to email me the installation instructions and drivers that were used?
Hi David - see my other post here : http://www.leesbian.net/2008/01/07/items-that-do-work-on-the-hackbook-pro
It shows exactly what is working at the moment, and the drivers I used. Graphics are working, full resolution with both QE and CI
Wifi isn’t working at the moment, but I’m sure it won’t be long now
I’ll make a series of posts in a week or so detailing the installation process.
Great. Can’t wait for your instructions.
I’ve been suffering with my TZ for altho it’s so light and cool and great in all ways Vista is just unusable and indeed, Apple doesn’t have a model that cuts it.
Just a question in the meanwhile, which exact TZ model is that? I have TZ17GN/B (as per box) respectively PCG-4L9P (as per bottom of VAIO). It’s a 100gb regulal HD 1GB ram model.
Hi Fred,
I can’t tell you what the box says because it’s filed away in storage right now.. on the label near the power socket it says ‘VGN-TZ90HS’ and on the bottom the label reads ‘PCG-4L2N’
I’ll try and get the build instructions posted next weekend
Lee,
Here’s the latest:
Built in Ethernet working! (inserted one line into a kext file as per InsanelyMac)
Wireless: Built in Intel wireless isn’t happening. Was using ASUS wireless USB adapter which has Mac drivers but I didn’t like the ASUS connection interface or the adapter sticking out so far from the left side of such a sleek machine.
After some research, found out that the Dell TrueMobile 1390 cards are natively compatible. Took a chance and tried a Dell 1390 ExpressCard. It worked!!! OS X recognizes it as an Airport wireless card!
Tomorrow i’ll try the INTERNAL Dell 1390 mini PCI express card. The TZ is supposed to have one open PCI express slot under the keyboard.
Couple of items to note:
1) Can’t wake up the unit from sleep, so you have to turn off sleep timers in preferences.
2) Sometimes I get a boot kernal panic. I think this has to do with hardware changes between boots. For example if I boot the machine with the wireless USB adapter or ExpressCard installed and shut down then remove one of those items and reboot, I get a kernal panic. If I boot again with the same items removed, no kernal panic and it boots fine. Just have to stay hardware consistent between successful boots.
With that, I would say everything pretty much works on this amazing little machine. I’m getting about 4 hours of battery life, which is great.
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