The Optical Drive May Be Turned On Or Off
- 1. Sony Vaio TX-Series Is Extremely Light, Chic, And Blessed With Extensive Power Saving Features
- 2. Feather Light And Gorgeous
- 3. Feather Light And Gorgeous, Continued
- 4. Ports And Connectors: Very Few Wishes Left Unfulfilled
- 5. Some Design Flaws
- 6. (Nearly) Ideal Status Indicator And Instant-on AV Use
- 7. An Expensive, Heavy Duty, High Current Battery Is Standard
- 8. An Adequately Sized Power Supply With A Long Recharge Time
- 9. VGA Output
- 10. Noise Output: Could Be Quieter
- 11. What About Fan Controls?
- 12. 11.1" TFT LED Backlit Display: A Solution For The Mobility Energy Crisis?
- 13. 11.1" TFT LED Backlit Display: A Viable Way Out For The Energy Crisis? Continued
- 14. LED Gotcha: Backlight Bleeding
- 15. Small Display + High Resolution = Lousy Readability
- 16. An Energy-efficient But Slow Hard Disk
- 17. The Optical Drive May Be Turned On Or Off
- 18. System RAM
- 19. A Hobbled, But Power-Efficient Audio Chip
- 20. Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Processor
- 21. Sony Power Manager: Complete Control Over Power Management
17. The Optical Drive May Be Turned On Or Off
Use of an ultra-slimline drive helps keep this laptop thin and sleek.
Sony even addressed the issue of energy conservation in its choice of optical drives. You don't push a button to open the drawer on this optical drive: instead, you push a button above the keys on the keyboard deck. Only when this button is pushed, does the drive start to draw power, and then the drawer opens.
This button is the only way to open the DVD drive under Windows XP.
The system also recognizes when there's no disk in the drive. When this occurs, the Power Management tool informs the user that it will shortly cut off power to the drive to conserve battery life.
To conserve energy, the Power Manager cuts off power to the DVD drive.
Before the power is cut off, the Power Manager informs the user; the drive then vanishes completely from Windows XP's view.
When the DVD drive is currently active, the Power Manager recognizes it's in use and won't cut off power to the device. When Windows XP isn't loaded and Power Manager is inactive - as, for example, when the laptop is booting up - the DVD drive may only be opened using a small button on its media drawer.
This small button will open the media drawer when Windows isn't running.
The wait time for the optical drive to recognize a disk can seem nerve-wrackingly long. It takes a full 13 seconds from the moment a disk is inserted into the media drawer, and the drawer closed until the drive can access media content.
Integrated Dual Layer DVD Burner: The drive can burn dual layer DVDs at speeds up to 2.4X.
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