My guess was it was an early production sample or the folks at Sony had disabled changes at this level. I’d presumed the firmware tweak would deliver some advantages – perhaps the wayward stylus performance would improve? Also some of the Modern apps were refusing to update. Another, was the accelerometer which would flip into portrait mode with everyday handling and would stubbornly refuse to return to landscape without some vigorous encouragement – cursing is optional, but very likely. There is an orientation lock in the base, but fumbling for it will probably set things off."All too often the bar itself bears no relationship whatsoever to the amount of time you're going to wait. In the same way the salary of a manager in this company has no connection with their worth.""You mean like when it says there are 13 minutes left for the install time but in reality there are either 7 or 34?" the PFY asks."Yes, but in terms of salaries," I reply. "See salaries are linked to an organisational chart, so what the HR beancounters like to see is that everyone on the same tier gets paid roughly the same money - within a range.""You would take another job. Or, within this company, you would need to do two things: A. Move your immediate boss up the organisational chart, and B. Change your job description somewhat to introduce an element of doubt into your work."
"OK, so you've grasped the bit about cleaning up the organisational chart - which is basically get a bunch of middle management axed in the name of greater productivity, reorganising working teams for greater efficiency, or enhancing interoffice synergies to reduce operating costs - you know, any old shit that sounds great when it's read out at an unfair dismissal hearing. So now you've got a director at tier 3 who reports to the Board at tier 2 with the CEO at tier 1."You're tier 8, say, because the company had more chiefs than Indians, but now there's nothing between you and tier 3. You will be sucked into the void, along with all the other tier 8s and before you know it he'll be looking for someone to manage the tier 8s. A better idea is to preserve the person above you - if they're not a complete air-thief - and clean out the rest. A quick organisational defrag and your boss is tier 4 and you're tier 5.""OK so you're the guy that replaces the toilet lollies and bog rolls every night and you suddenly get defragged 4 levels up the food chain. They'll still only pay you at level 12 rates because you're doing a level 12 job. What you need to do is change your job to one of those fancy schmancy ones so that HR has no idea what you actually do.
"You construct a 10 page position description full of Key Performance Indicators - or even more pathetic, Key Success Indicators - or you can generate your own special terms by picking one word from these 3 groups and putting them together: Essential, Directed, Measurable; Vision, Service, Delivery; Targets, Metrics, Outcomes, and before you know it your role is described in terms of Directed Delivery Metrics.""Nothing, that's the point. And the other thing you do is go wide and abstract - never actually describing anything in any detail. 'Sanitation engineer' is barely sufficient to get you up a single tier because everyone sees it for the euphemism it is. You don't work in the fields of hygiene, disinfectant or porcelain skid marks - you're level 5 material now! You're the Corporate Holistic Wellness Coordinator - responsible for the on-going delivery of wellness in the workplace. Your 'measurable vision metrics' are tied to workplace attendance which you can fake by offering sickies a free bowl of chips for breakfast on a Monday morning.
"Sure, they'll die of heart disease sooner, but by then you'll be another tier up the ladder and it'll be someone else's problem. Speaking of which - because no one knows what the hell it is you do, you'll find that you have a stack of tier 9 to 12s suddenly working for you. You'll let a few of the lazy ones go to give the impression you know what the hell it is they do, but really you're just killing time till you're found out - which you can put off for years.""Well say there was a big defrag in IT management. You'll want to have a tier 6, say, job, because obviously I'd want a tier 5 job and who needs the hassle? We'll keep the Boss because he has no idea how his mobile phone works, let alone how we do. We write him a primo Job Description, write ourselves something similarly bewildering, and then... slip into the hole. You'll want to think of a JD with the word Architect in it. They bloody love that word these days - and it's not like the old days when you had to eat pencils or have a goatee. Solutions Architect is maybe a tier 7 at best, but a Corporate IT Integration architect is a 6. Workplace Systems Architect is a 5 and before you know it you'd have half the beancounters working for you."
Two minutes later the CEO's problem is found - the adapter wasn't plugged in and he missed all the warning messages about battery remaining."It's not your fault," I say to the CEO. "I've recommended making those warning messages bigger for months now but it looks like all the good ideas filtered out by management.""Well I suggested one about your laptop saying good morning to you when you start up - but also saying good afternoon and evening to you, depending on what time it was.""Really? It could do that?" the CEO gasps while grasping onto an idea so appalling the PFY is probably going to punch me in the face on the way back down in the lift - except that I happened to hear the CEO burbling about the very same thing at lunch a couple of weeks back.
"Of course. I suggested it but apparently someone above me thought it was a stupid and dumb idea that only a cretin would think of. But I think it's a great plan. We could roll it out through all the company machines!"Anyway, a bit of fruitless fiddling around later and it still wouldn’t bite. So this was followed up by some hapless fiddling around – the odd default reset here and there – and lo, I have a brick in the shape of a Vaio Duo. Oops, sorry Sony. So the next one arrived and the BIOS on this model was the same. In the interim, Sony’s site had uploaded another "sustaining" update, so I tried again and again, no luck with either. Oh well. Just for the record, that accelerometer borders on unbearable at the best of times. Apparently it relies on a Microsoft driver, and hopefully there’s a fix coming in some form or another.
The Vaio Duo features NFC, which I had no use for, and there's GPS too if you need it. Sony’s Vaio Control Centre app provides speedy access to a range of commonly used features, and having scoured the keyboard for dedicated controls to alter the Duo's backlighting, I eventually found the functions here. Handy power and performance modes can be switched over too, without trawling through the Windows options. In balanced/standard mode, the Vaio Duo 11 clocked up a PCMark 7 score of 4731 with the best performance settings notching this up to 4893.Incidentally, start-up is typical of a Windows 8 machine with an SSD, namely, pretty darned quick – about six second to the login screen. Sony doesn’t give a battery life figure but you'd need to some pretty frugal power adjustments to manage five hours out of it and HD video will playback will deliver only half that. There’s the VGP-BPSC31 sheet battery option too, that clips on the base which Sony claims doubles the duration and will set you back around £119.And so to bed. A true test of a laptop is surely lazing around watching a movie. OK, so we’ve got Dolby Home Theater V4 here with presets for music, movies and gaming which don’t sound too bad actually. Not exactly booming, but spacious and not too harsh. And we’ve got that bright, crisp 1920 x 1080-pixel screen – what’s not to like?