Welcome the Weatherlight

It is fall, a good season for poetry and hardware upgrades.

After I decided not to upgrade my desktop computer (Mechanus) from AMD's A10 Thunderb... err... Piledriver to Intel Haswell, I came into agreement with myself that somewhat failing, my two years old Sony SB (Daito) has to be replaced, or rather substituted for, a new Haswell überbook. So that I have a gaming PC, new portable operations base does not have to carry a good graphics processor, as its predecessor did. Also switchable graphics on Sony Vaio notebooks are great pain in some unpleasant places if you intend to use or even give a try for another Unix-flavoured operating system, which otherwise works too good than your average expectations from such a mechanism (median expectations stuff is a fallace, I know. Take it as just a figure of speech)

So, here is the new baby: Weatherlight

Ps. If you do not know about it, it is the time. I name my computers, not to attribute them any sort of persona or personal traits but just for fun. It is an old habit I grew after I came across with that concept in dear Mr. Jerry Purnelle's articles. It is always fun to remember names and their naming logic. Also they remind me of good ol'things. The previous names in brackets are of those my current computers. I had Miyamoto, Ejderkesen (Turkish for Dragonslayer, or rather more literally Dragonslicer/cutter), Teferi, Caern... etc. over the years. :)

Welcome aboard!

Weatherlight takes its name from Magic: the Gathering's Rath cycle, being the single largest piece of The Legacy, home to the heroes from many continents of Dominaria. Unlike its namesake flying ship, this Weatherlight really does not fly but it does weight a mere 870 grams. No optical stuff, no abundance of wired connectivity, not a pleasing graphics processor, neither a powerhouse number cruncher CPU and of course not much of a memory... All it has is those it does not have got: Weight and useless frivolities that you would not always seek in an Ultrabook.

Sony VAIO Pro 11 with Razer Orochi

So, what do we really have got here inside this 870 grams of bliss? An Intel ultra low voltage Haswell architecture CPU (Ci5-4200U) 4 GBs of DDR3 RAM, 128 GB of SATA3 SSD (quite fast; by the way 13-inch VAIO Pro models have got PCIe drives, I am pooooor :P ), Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11ac wireless network (this is why wireless won't work without a proper kernel compilation on Ubuntu releases prior to 13.10), an HDMI, two USB 3.0 (with one sleepcharger port, oh, I just made that up. That'd make a good brand :) ), a four-lid 3.5 mm headphone/mic jack (yeah, that supports your mobile phone headphones with mics), stereo speakers well hidden between far edge of body and lid hinge, SD HC card reader, touch-FULL-HD-IMBA-screen (yes, on an 11-inch Überbook)... To be honest I am not that good with glossy touch screens. My previous Sony VAIO SB (Daito) had matte screen which would allow you to dim the screen even in bright day light to conserve some battery. Now I have to fire it up to compensate the reflections even on not-that-luminous workplaces.

That's it. It unfortunately comes preloaded with Win 8 single language. Not a good option for a SysAdmin. Some features might not work on Win 7 or GNU/Linux distos. I suggest, if you are going to make a dual boot system try to fetch a Win 8 Pro license, which would cost you one fifth of the laptop's price tag (box) or one tenth (OEM, which I DO HATE).

I am going to write on some experences and accessories later on.

Till next time, stay light, stay weatherlight.