you might think the MacBook Air is very thin you might also think Sony’s earlier Z505 laptop is very thin but that is nothing compared to the Sony Vio X505 released in 2004 this is a truly insanely thin laptop and thanks to Douglas here in Adelaide for lending me this i can’t wait to open it up so let’s take a closer look for a box that’s around 22 years old it’s held up remarkably well even though this is an extremely thin laptop it’s running an Intel CPU of a very low wattage sony really went all out with this sleek premium filling box but that’s enough about the box let’s take a look at the X505P that’s contained within you might think this is a rather large box for such a small laptop well laptops used to come with accessories they rarely do these days though but to be fair Sony definitely had to find a way to justify the very steep price for this particular device this includes a very nice carry bag which reveals just how small and slim the X505 is that super thin design does make the frame flex quite a bit though amazingly there is still a decent selection of ports with the large Sony charging plug integrated into the hinge itself the other side has a headphone jack and PC card slot clearly someone took very good care of this laptop throughout its life but what else came in the box of this high-end laptop since this is a Sony Vio there are going to be a ton of booklets and documentation sadly these are all in Japanese a language I cannot read but it’s still super cool to see this stuff regardless douglas had included a CF card adapter giving us a reason to open up the laptop and replace the hard disk later in the video assuming I can navigate the foreign language I should be able to do a fresh install of Windows XP onto that CF card along with the instruction booklets are several advertisements from 2003 once again I really wish I could read Japanese as I really have no idea what any of this says one last downside to the region specific nature of the Vio is the Japanese power plug but thankfully I have a heap of these figure8 style laptop power cords lying around the last laptop I bought brand new didn’t even come with a single instruction booklet but wait there’s more with a similar design to the laptop bag is a small pouch with some more peripherals a dongle as well as a rather oddly shaped mouse and while the X505 has a reasonable selection of ports it is far too thin for VGA and Ethernet so the dongle has to be used for those the mouse actually has a rather odd feature a memory stick slot which as I found out is a different size compared to the Memory Stick Pro Duo card I had lying around i’ve never seen another mouse that includes a card reader before but what’s it like actually using one of these Vios here in 2025 running one of the lowest wattage single core processors of 2003 and of course Windows XP with the power adapter connected let’s begin ah yes the also nostalgic Windows XP boot screen you love to see it and about 40 seconds later it was all ready to go i have no idea what any of this says and my god it’s been many years since I’ve seen Norton antivirus this model actually came standard with an impressive 512 MGB of RAM and a 20 GB hard drive i don’t particularly like the current background but there are a few other Sony VIA ones to choose from thankfully that is much better and just like most Sony computers of the time there are a lot of pre-installed applications being so impossibly thin device definitely check out EcoFlow’s Delta Pro 3 with a huge 4 kWh capacity paired with an impressive 4,000W AC inverter output you can power practically any household appliance another excellent feature is EcoFlow’s app which allows you to control so many aspects of the power station easily setting charge and discharge limits or even limit the rate of charge to help extend the life of the power station the options are pretty vast and the input options are also quite extensive with the ability to charge the Delta Pro 3 at up to 2600 W ecoflow are also giving away a River 3 UPS power station to enter the competition all you’ve got to do is leave a comment below with the # EcoFlow Australia the Delta Pro 3 also has under 10 millisecond UPS switchover time so if you’re after a real all-in-one power station for reliable home power backup off the grid living or a way to store solar energy a quiet and powerful Delta Pro 3 could be right for you to find out more click the links in the description below ecoflow have up to 45% off right now thanks to their end of financial year sales so definitely go check them out you can also find EcoFlow and their power stations offline at leading retailers here in Australia this particular model was released exclusively in Japan in 2003 and near the end of that year was being exported internationally for around $34.99 through various online companies dynamism.com being one of them they exported a wide variety of Japanese exclusive tech and adjusted for inflation this would have cost just shy of $6,000 in 2025 money it really was an exciting time to be someone with lots of money to spend on interesting and wacky laptop designs and a wacky design this is the keyboard towards the bottom of the laptop with a small track point for controlling the mouse compared against the original MacBook Air which had the selling point of being super thin the Vio is indeed thinner and lighter the earlier Sony Vio Z505 looks rather thick by comparison however that thin design did have some drawbacks wi-fi wasn’t built in and by late 2003 it was fairly common for this feature to be integrated into most laptops themselves if an optical drive is important to you you will not find one in the X505 for obvious reasons but this external CDROM drive is actually thicker than the laptop itself and if you wanted a Sony branded external DVD rewritable drive at the time it would have cost you around $600 thankfully you don’t have to pay that much these days since optical media is pretty much dead the PC card slot external CD ROM drive doesn’t appear to work without further configuration but that is made a little bit harder due to the language barrier how about some other external peripherals such as the mouse if you’re right-handed you’ll find that this cable length is somewhat short it’s not a horrible mouse to use and in fact I’d say it’s very usable while on the smaller side I honestly prefer using the little mouse instead of the pointer knob which is a little bit awkward to use due to its placement and the keyboard being so far down takes a lot of getting used to even worse if you use it on a lap instead of a desk i gave it a shot and I really wasn’t a fan to complete our setup I’ll try using a random USB DVD drive I had lying around thankfully it worked straight away and I guess I left my Star Wars Battlefront disc in there and I was also able to connect to a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network but further configuration to get this online would be needed i tried updating to XP Service Pack 3 but it is language specific and sadly the standalone Japanese update version is no longer available on Microsoft’s website or even archive.org so I simply downloaded the retail version in Japanese that meant to complete the Service Pack 3 update I’ll have to burn the ISO to CD thankfully I do still have some blank optical media stored away it’s It’s been a long time since I’ve used these and I really never thought I would be burning a CD in 2025 i’ll be honest I did forget how to do this it’s really as simple as right clicking on the ISO in Mac OS and then clicking burn to disk now we have Japanese Windows XP on a bootable CDROM now I can go ahead and update Windows XP i want to preserve all the Sony Vio software on here so I’m not going to do a complete fresh install and to help navigate the language barrier I tried using this thing called Google Lens which kind of helped and after some time now we have Windows XP Service Pack 3 it’s time to go through and install some games and applications this model only came with a 20 GB hard drive so space is somewhat limited ah yes who doesn’t love that Windows XP startup jingle while the very low wattage 1 GHz Intel processor has weak integrated graphics it can run much older 3D games pretty well lego Island 2 is very much playable quake 3 Arena is another game that runs well on here i must admit that the little Sony mouse does make aiming a challenge though and this is the first time I’ve ever used 3D Mark 2001 benchmark once again the little Sony Vio laptop holds up reasonably well i did however find that a lot of newer applications even after installing Service Pack 3 struggled to run sadly no Star Wars Battlefront for me it seems but our good old friend Space Cadet Pimble on the other hand has never let us down it always brings back good memories of using the school computers around 20 years ago so it’s time to see just what’s inside this super thin device and swap out the old hard drive to maintain the relative thinness the battery is only three cells with a 2,000 MIA capacity and it looks as if one of the Tri-wing screws is already damaged which isn’t good and to get inside there are many different screws to remove the undamaged ones came out easily without much effort the stripped one even with the correct bit and the right amount of downward pressure did not turn whoever tried to open this previously mustn’t have been successful the problem is the laptop is so flimsy that you can’t press down very hard without the risk of breaking the casing i tried using a rubber band a tiny speck of superglue on the screwdriver tip but nothing would make it turn this isn’t my laptop and given how rare it is I did not want to cause any damage i really wanted to see how this laptop was put together but the fact that it is so slim and flexible means that drilling out the strip screw could cause further damage either way it’s been very cool to take a look at this rare Sony laptop that I had no idea even existed should you buy one today here in 2025 as a collectible oddity sure but as something to actually use I would say it’s much better left in the past i think it is a real shame that Sony didn’t really sell these laptops outside of Japan very much although to be fair given the price I don’t think they would have sold all that well but either way this was a great look back at something that you don’t really see much anymore a laptop that actually includes accessories yes it included a laptop bag as well big thanks to Douglas for lending me this i don’t know how I would have ever come across one myself he actually had to import it from Japan himself either way I’ve really had a good time looking at it and I hope you have as well thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you in the next one