VGN-NR
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Overview
The VAIO VGN-NR line was among Sony’s first few notebook series meant to tackle the then-expanding budget market back in 2007 with their relatively competitive pricing. It was designed for general home use such as basic internet tasks and casual multimedia as well as office work. A successor to the VGN-N series, it was constructed entirely of plastic and boasted an average entry-level laptop build quality (although magnesium was used for hinge support, meaning that it was built moderately better than plenty of its intended competition at the time). The VGN-NR was available in a wide variety of colors, such as grey (most common), white, silver, chocolate brown and pink.
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Detailed Specs
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo, Celeron or Pentium Dual Core (Socket P, not soldered)
Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 or NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT
Chipset: Intel GM/PM965 Express (800MHz)
Memory: DDR2 SDRAM PC2-5300 SO-DIMM (667MHz), not soldered, 2 slots, max 4GB (8GB unofficially), Standard 2GB
Display: 15.4" wide TFT WXGA (1280x800)
Storage: 160GB 2.5" HDD SATA 5400rpm
Weight: 2.9 kilograms
MSRP: around £549 to £699
Problems
The NVIDIA equipped NRs all have a very unfortunate problem. They contain a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT GPU. The NVIDIA 8 series of GPUs are known for their 100% failure rate because of a manufacturing problem from NVIDIA, and the NR is not an exception to that. All NVIDIA 8 series chips on every single NR is affected by this problem.
Symptoms of this problem are:
- black screen when turning on the device (device is not booting up, it has not passed the power-on self-test)
- artifacts on the display
- not being able to successfully install GPU drivers
- unable to boot into Linux (distros with proper GPU drivers)
There is no real permanent solution to this problem. One temporary solution would be a reflow, one more permanent but still temporary solution is a reball or chip replacement. However, all of these methods requires a precise hot air station, BGA No-Clean flux, and some experience (practicing on a junk board is a good start).
Daily Usage Today
The NR deals with office tasks and basic web browsing okay-ish. It can run your favourite office programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint and LibreOffice fairly well, including a selection of web pages, however it struggles with video playback and even normal webpages. It is highly recommended to run an old OS such as Windows XP or a lightweight Linux distribution such as Devuan or Lubuntu. With upgrades such as a Core 2 Duo T9300, 4GB RAM as well as an SSD, they are surprisingly usable today. The VGN-NR can usually be found for extremely cheap today, as these weren't very noteworthy VAIOs.
Resources
You can bypass the model checks of these discs by using SVRP.
Follow our guides to download and install drivers.