Sony Vaio UX eBay Price Guide

Version 1 – Prices researched from 5/15/2023 to 5/19
Cover photo taken from eBay seller PC Monde, a lot of old tech, and “collectables”.
Yellow background hi-res UX taken from UniStore.
Google Spreadsheet – UX, PictureBook, & Vaio P laptops.

One morning, after my daily dosage of Chronic Ale & Alaskan Amber, I was thinking about those Sony UMPCs. It was after watching a video of the Sony PictureBook, I remember how wild one of those Vaio laptops were, the design and compactness of them. So wanting something like that, I found a VGN-UX for sale and it was oddly cheap, $50 with a bad LCD. Looked to see what they sell for, definitely more, so I snatched it, based BIN. Going ahead, I was looking for parts, chargers are plentiful and cheap so I bought one immediately. When I got it, the damn screen wasn’t an easy fix, I presumed I would be able to get away with applying pressure to the sides of the LCD. Although I did notice some lines went away, I still had no display, so something else is goofy. Knowing this might be the case, I had already assumed that I may need to buy a $70 LCD from China. In a few months it’ll arrive, additionally I bought 1.8″ PATA ZIF SSD adapters to play with. The damage in total is about $150 or so. It’ll be on the market for like $250 when I get bored with it.

But I couldn’t just do prices of the VGN-UX only, I looked at other Vaio’s as well. Like that one that can fit in your pocket, that’s the VAIO P and goddamn it has a long ass screen. Then there’s the PictureBook that I saw from what’s his face, cool those had a TransMeta Crusoe processor in them. I thought that was the OG, but then there was the Vaio U, and they also had a Tablet machine. So the UX is kinda like a combo of both those things, neat. And for the hell of it, I looked up the Vaio 505 “SuperSlim”, that’s the OG system. Considering ThinkPad 200 and 500 systems are coming hard to find, Vaio may be the next best thing, as quite a bit of these did come with a pointing stick!

Price guide meaning

Sold – How many units sold in the past 3 months (of search date). However 30 units is really low (150 is a decent number for one model, but 30 for an entire series of machines?)
Low – Best price you can get, may need parts to fix or fully working
Mid – Probably a lil bit ugly and missing some parts, but should be working… or broken
High – Should be a fully working machine, but may need accessories.
EX+ – Should be fully working with accessories, & might come with a box.
DONT – Over fucking priced… Some of these are the available units, not the sold ones. But still jfc.

To me, these things are expensive thanks to not being a best . There are other things to buy instead, specifically the GPD devices if you want a snazzy UMPC & might come with joysticks.

Sony Vaio UX – UMPC

Notes & thoughts when searching these

• VGN-UX All
  • below low there are units for parts, paid $50 for mine :D. also some units past mid price are untested or working…. fuck.
• UX50
  • On the only system sold, the batteries were recelled with new 18650…. actually this is a fucking good as deal if you’re scared of challenging that. comes with bottom dock, VGA cable/headphone thingy and the stylus! Screen has protector
• UX90S
  • only sold unit boots to XP, working, with antenna, no stylus. battery is shot, and comes with canon charger… lol
• UX180P
  • low price is what I paid :D. mid price is from spain and has the fucking LCD problem i have…. high price unit boots and is working fine. On DONT prices, they are all available units, most are WITHOUT THE FUCKING BOX??!?!?!? FUCK OFF. Don’t bite.
• UX280P
  • Eh, Either 320 or 350 for mid price, idk.
• UX380
  • Damn this thing is wanted… lmafo. ok my general prices are wrong. w/e. Low price is AS IS BIN,mid price is literally the 2nd listing. yeah. This was auctioned and high price is auctions/BIN/offer. EX+ comes with the box. AND has issues lol
• UX490N
  • crazy expensive jfc bc it has a solid state and 1GB RAM i guess. or thats not why, but w/e. 2 systems working 100% but one says the touchscreen is bad, and it has a lil dent on the LCD>
• UX1XN
  • Someone upgraded to Windows 10 and it fucking has a screenshot of task manager, fucking thing is using 938MB RAM out of 1GB, thats the MAX you can get.

Specs of VGN-UX

• 4.5″ 1024 x 600 LCD – Pen & Finger touch input – 128:75 aspect ratio = 16 : 9.375
  • UX92SSD
    • UX490N, UX58GB
• Intel Core Solo Processor
  • 1.06GHz U1300
    • VGN-UX50, VGN-UX230
  • 1.2GHz U1400
    • UX90S, UX90SSD, UX180P, UX280P, UX17GP, UX17TP, UX18C
  • 1.33GHz U1500
    • UX91S, UX380N, UX390N, UX1XN, UX27TN, UX27GN, UX38GN
• Intel Core 2 Solo Processor
  • 1.2GHz U2200
    • UX92, UX92SSD, UX490N, UX58GN
• iGPU Intel GMA 950 graphics
  • All systems
• Memory – All systems soldered?
  • 512MB
    • UX50, UX90S, UX90SSD, UX180P, UX230P, UX17GP, UX17TP, UX18C
  • 1GB
    • UX90S, UX92, UX91S, UX92SSD, UX280P, UX280P, UX380N, UX390N, UX490N, UX1XN, UX27TN, UX27GN, UX38GN, UX58GN,
  • 400MHz
    • All US Systems
      • UX180P, UX230P, UX280P, UX380N, UX390N, UX490N
  • 533MHz
    • Worldwide
      • UX50, UX90S, UX90S, UX90S, UX92, UX90SSD, UX91S, UX92SSD, UX1XN, UX17GP, UX17TP, UX18C, UX27TN, UX27GN, UX38GN, UX58GN
• Storage
  • 1.8″ PATA ZIF socket
    • Fuck listing every hard drive, they are all slow as shit.
      • SSD systems
        • Any system with SSD in their model name…
        • UX91S, UX390N, UX490N, UX1XN, UX18C, UX38GN, UX58GN
      • Easy to upgrade an SSD via PATA ZIF adapters
• Expansion slot (only one option)
  • CF Card Slot
  • Singular Edge SIM card slot

Which system is the best one to get?

VGN-UX92SSD, because U2200 CPU, 1GB RAM, and 64GB SSD. UX490N, and UX58GN are runners up with 48GB SSD, and UX92 has a 100GB spinning rust. Otherwise you’ll probably get a system with a core solo Wait… there aren’t really any benchmarks for these… and Passmark has the U2200 with 312 score while the U1500 has a 375 score. Even tho the U1500 is Yonah and the U2200 is the newer Merom, I thought it being a Core 2 Solo would be better than a Core Solo, but I was wrong, it is slower lol. Maybe has a better instruction set and power consumption, but if we are talking numbers then the U1500 is better. SO THEN – UX38GN would be the best system out of the box, with it’s 32GB SSD. But for US systems with the slower RAM, UX390N would be the next best thing.

But performance on these things… Is going to suck hard. For one thing, my ThinkPad X300 has a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo L7100 processor. That thing scored 467 on passmark and it struggled to do basic tasks. I’m not sure how bad a Core Solo processor will, but I will have to find out another time. 🙂

Parts buying & repairing

I busted one of these things open and they got a lot of screws, but it’s not that bad all things considered. Maybe less fussy than an iBook of the era, and in comparison to some Sony Vaio laptops I’ve worked on, its easier. Also because it’s fairly difficult to quickly rip open and sort of delicate, I doubt eWaste places are gonna waste their time to remove the hard drive (and cable). They might drill a hole into the thing, or chuck it, but I doubt they’re gonna try doing this when it makes profit if they don’t touch it and resell (data wipe maybe included).

Can you flip these? Sure but not as easy as old IPS ThinkPads. There really aren’t that many of these for sale, and worse, there are no replacement parts. For the most part, I see quite a bit of these systems not complete; by default they’ll come with a dock connector/port replicator attached on the bottom. Next you have the lil expansion cable, basically ethernet, VGA and headphone jack, so video out is the only loss IMO on this thing unless u don’t like wifi. Sometimes some are missing the strap, but really it’s nothing special other than a sony logo and it can be gimmicked from another Sony Camera or phone.

This machine uses a ThumbPad pointing stick (an enlarged & squared TrackPoint) for navigation and for the most part, they seem to deteriorate if used heavily. It kind of feels like it’s made with whatever older trackpoints were made out of. Maybe it’ll be possible to 3D print a button and it’ll be plastic instead of that material.

Haven’t been able to really see much, but it looks like the keyboards on these are fairly solid. Most seem to have their keys intact & don’t really look like they got deteriorated or shiny (well the LED backlit will glow thru it) caps. They have a blue LED backlight & it has that futuristic-styling text on the keycaps. It’s hella fuckin nostalgic to the era… so fucking good. Legit I miss cellphones with keyboards, I forget which I had, but I was a big fan of the LG Envy 2 or 3.

Don’t buy a stylus on eBay, alibaba has one for cheap… however it seems like a generic stylus/pen gizmo, so it may be easy to mimic. Don’t know the measurements (and honestly it’ll probably bring a can of worms figuring it out). From this one picture, I guess the stylus retracts out, so it’ll give you better precision and handling? But remember, these are both pen and finger touch, so unless you need something extremely specific that requires a stylus in 2023… skip the stylus unless for bragging rights, just get a generic one, or a few & work it out to fit in the silo.

Screen are available from china, local ones are way more expensive if you can’t wait. I’m not sure on all systems, but mine uses a Sharp LS045W1LA01 (ebay link here), and thankfully its LED backlit. I’m waiting for a screen, but I have a feeling it will not come with the digitizer. So if yours is broken, replacing the LCD will prob not fix it, and there doesn’t seem to be digitizers available. I believe it is possible to re-attach the digitizer (I removed mine, but I haven’t been able to test it on a working screen yet), but it’ll require precise hands or maybe a magnifying glass.

Hard drives are gonna be slow, they are similar to iPod drives. That’s a good thing because there are plenty of ZIF IDE adapters to your solid state of choosing. I’m gonna go the mSATA route as it is quite cheap due to the move to NVMe currently and there are plenty of drives available. I will not gain any speed and if you want to be period accurate, CF Card will probably be a better bet. I’ve read some BS about old machines not booting newer or most CF Cards, and require older ones which have a certain chip/setting in the firmware… but I’m also a bit of a drunk & might be mis-remembering.

Conclusion

Still waiting to get mine working. If you can find a decent example under $100, maybe its a thing to try out. It’s unlikely you’ll get a turn key machine, so expect to shell a bit for an LCD, or maybe get lucky, idk. There’s also the OQO and newer GPD devices which may be a better bet for gaming if you want to do that on a small portable. It’s slow, so I doubt you’ll use all the data on a 4G LTE card if you have one. Its extremely small, way past an UltraPortable & it’s keyboard is minimal vs those handheld PCs (HP Jordana, Toshiba Libretto), but if you want somethin newer than a Psion Series 3 or 5… keep on looking because jesus christ these prices are ridiculous. There gots to be a better old ultraportable or handheld out there.