Official 2012 Sony S Series Owners Thread

hello again! Just another quick question, and I'm not sure if someone has already answered it, but how is the cooling on this laptop? How hot is it under heavy load? (for both the s13 or s15, though Im leaning more towards s15)

edit: also wanted to ask about fan noise

 

Those who are looking for drivers for their system can find them by following the links below. These links are to Sony's US Support site.

VAIO 13.3" S Series Custom Laptop
- SVS131190X Standard
- SVS131190X Enhanced
- Drivers & Support

VAIO 13.3" S Series Custom Laptop
- SVS13A190X Premium
- Drivers & Support

VAIO 15.5" S Series Custom Laptop
- SVS151190X Standard
- SVS151190X Enhanced
- SVS151190X Performance
- Drivers & Support

 

Any reports on the Sony Vaio S13? I'm not coming across alot of reviews.

 

There have not appeared to be many professional reviews but what made me purchase the S13 Premium were a few amateur video reviews on You Tube that clearly showed the notebook from all angles including some great off center and side views of the screen, which to me seemed pretty good. I am a bit about screen quality and viewing angles. This is for my wife but I would not have purchased it if the screen was low quality. It is an attractive notebook as well.

 

I've watched all youtube vids I could find and they seemed positive. Still in need for some information about the battery though! I'm still not sure which one to buy, the S13 or S13A (with better graphics card but 200€ more).

 

^
A couple people here saw the non-premium S13 with the 1366 by 768 screen and said it was disappointing with the poor viewing angles and dull colors.

 

If you care about image quality you'll want to avoid the standard S13, which in my opinion has an unimpressive display. I recommend the S13A, which has a higher-quality, high-resolution display.

 

For european, don't need to go with the S13A, both of SA and S have the option of 1600x900 premium.

 

Including the premium screen the i5 + 1GB 640M S13 would cost me 1000 euro while the S13A with i5 + 640M 2 GB would cost me 1200. So they would have the same screen but I would pay 200 more for a better processor and graphics card. I'm wondering if its worth it though, 20% more expensive is quite a higher price.

 

2 GB of THIS GPU is absolutely useless only in specific situations (for example, in game, This GPU with 2 GB is useless, this would have the exactly same performance in game than the 1. After, in movies edition, it might be a difference.).

 

I don't know if you care, but I absolutely love the 1600x900 resolution on a 13.3" screen. I'm coming from a 14" screen, and yet I don't find this "small" or "restricting" at all!

 

Just received new Premium Series 13.3 with i7, 4 GB memory, 500 GB 7200rpm drive, Win 7 64-bit, 2GB graphics card.

Installed iTunes 64 bit and that app is constantly not responding. Have to close and restart often. Obviously it is not the Sony.

Any known compatibility issues with the S Series. ?

I ordered with the Fresh Start so there is not as much junk installed from Sony.

Any advice appreciated.

Flyer

 

The setup in my sig came in this morning. Dropped a m4 ssd in along with some extra RAM asap...

What can I say? This thing flies. Build quality excellent, thermals excellent, I'm a fan. No problems to report of yet

 

I finally bit the bullet and ordered an SSD for my laptop (Crucial m4 256gb). I have a couple of questions:

1. Does windows disable defragmentation on this automatically?
2. I have seen people disable paging and hibernation. However, I use hibernation pretty frequently -- is it going to lower the life of my ssd?
3. How much of a difference can I expect to notice in the battery life, and heating?

 

1. Nope
2. Not really, SSDs have a life that will far outlive your use of the computer. The main reason why people disable hibernation is that you can gain some space back. (Saves 4-12GB, depending on how much RAM you have)
3. Battery life should marginally increase, but probably not by much. My m4 doesn't really heat up, but neither did the hard drive, so I dunno.

One question though, what makes you choose hibernate over sleep? I can't think of any occasion where I' rather hibernate so I disabled it.

 

Oh, that's weird, I thought Windows 7 was smart enough to disable defrag when it recognises an SSD! I'll have to do it manually I guess.

I have switched to almost exclusively using Hibernate instead of shutdown. Sleep is good when you are away from the laptop for a short time (15-20mins?) but when I want to save the state, for say, overnight, I generally hibernate.
I guess that stemmed out of the computer taking a long time to start, and then open Chrome.. Maybe if SSD doesn't take as long, I might stop using hibernate so frequently.

 

So the first thing you do is install the biggest piece of bloatware that other company makes?

 

have you updated all your drivers for both windows, java, flash, everything on the sony vaio s support page drivers, - try and download itunes again. use ccleaner after deleting this corrupt version of itunes, and see if there is improvement.


have you validated your version of window 7(activated it?)


edit: if you removed some of the programs associated with itunes (your dl'ing a bundle of crap with itunes these days) it might also screw some things up. check the task manager to see if itunes64.exe is using resources correctly or immediately stops responding. and try using your other programs, and do a hard drive test to make sure its not faulty hard drive.

 

Disable Hibernate, and use Sony's Rapid Wake instead. It has a smaller disk footprint and is faster to sleep and wake on a HDD by a fair amount than the built-in MSFT version.

I actually kept Rapid Wake on with my SSD installed as well.

 

Thank you, sir!

 

1. It should but you have to verify just in case.
2. Depends on total RAM. On SSD coming from hibernation with 8GB and over of RAM probably takes the same or more time than cold boot. With 4GB of RAM hibernation is generally faster. That's without consideration for possible hibernation bugs in BIOS and OS, which are quite likely.
3. The problem with rotational drives is that there are spikes of power consumption and access latency during spin-up. It also does not require a lot of power to keep it spinning. So, turning spin-down off might help if you are actively working with data on disk. But if you rarely access disk (for example, you are browsing and configured browser to keep cache in memory) then it's better to let it spin-down and conserve energy that way. With SSD, no matter the scenario, it works optimal all the time. The point? It depends on usage.

 

Yes, that was something I was actually planning on doing. Thanks!

[Sorry for all the double posts -- I am used to forums collapsing successive posts into one. I'll avoid it from now on!]

 

Wow, that was a labor of love.
I successfully intstalled a hdd in the odd bay using a odd adapter I had lying around. Doing this required full dissassembly of the laptop:




heres the slot load odd from sony:

and here is my hdd in the odd's spot:


It took about an hour and a half to do, mainly because I had no dissassembly guide to follow, and there are two cables that are really hard to reattach.
Unfortunately, after plugging everything in and booting up, windows doesn't even see the hard drive. It doesn't show up in bios either. Still working on a solution for that.
However, one huge improvement is that the squishyness in that was in the left side of the keyboard (s15 owners you know what I'm talking about) is COMPLETELY GONE. The keyboard feels much more solid because there is actually something underneath it. It does feel slightly heavier on the left side now though.

I'm not going to bother making a guide for dissassembly/installing an odd adapter because it's not recognized. We need a bios update from sony fixing sata 3, and enabling the odd adapters.

Still, I've been wanting to take apart this thing all weekend, so it was still fun. If the odd bay hard drive never winds up working, I'm just going to grab a huge ssd in a year or so.

 

Thank you for taking such detailed pictures! It's great to finally see the inside. One question, does the HDD spin up? I'd assume it would but just making sure.

 

Source/Proof the S13A is not IPS? Sony UK states it has coverage for Adobe RGB colour space..

 

It doesn't disable defreg, HOWEVER, the defreg application will refuse to run on a SATA drive with a reported 0 RPM (SSD).

Oooohhh.... This seems good

I just gotta wait on a silver version in the US, lol


However, just as a note, I think in the Clevo/Sager forums, one of the 15" laptops can be configured with a 97% NTSC TN panel(way further gamut coverage than Adobe RGB, and higher than most consumer IPS panels, too).

 

Just wanted to add that I found a configuration of the S15 on newegg that I can't recreate in the US Sony Vaio site. Meets my price point for the things it comes with.. the only glaringly bad thing is that it comes with the 5400RPM 640GM drive. I can fix that later myself though.

SONY VAIO SVS15113FXS Notebook Intel Core i5 3210M(2.50GHz) 15.5" 6GB Memory 640GB HDD 5400rpm Slot Loading CD/DVD Player / Burner NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M LE

...for just under a thousand, free 3 day shipping too. In case this fits the needs for someone else I wanted to point it out.

 

They sell that i5 version at the retail Sony Stores up here in Canuckistan for $999, along with the 3520M/8GB/750GB 5400 version for $1299 (and they list it on the Sony.ca website).

 

Could someone take a high-res picture of the bottom of your CF black S13P?

Much appreciated!

 

Hm, can't say I've ever seen an actual Sony store, just Sony products in different retail stores (not that I've looked for them). That's cool though. Maybe someone who doesn't live near one will benefit.

 

Just ordered S13 exhanced today. US-SVS131190X-LBOM-2

3rd gen Intel® Core™ i5-3210M processor; 13.3" LED backlit display (1366 x 768); 500GB (7200rpm) hard drive; 6GB (4GB fixed onboard + 2GB removable) DDR3-1333Mhz; NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 640M LE (1GB) hybrid graphics with Intel® Wireless Display technology.

AND IT IS PINK. THATS WHY I CHOSE SONY ; _; Sony has the most beautiful pink color of laptops in the market I guess(based on my research), which is also pretty rare.(most are black/silver= = sick of them)

And i got the freeps3 too which is going to ship tmr. But for the laptop, err i got the Estimated Ship Date of 07/05/2012 TAT Dont know if it is accurate.... hope it is NOT Q~Q Hope to get it soon, i`ll post pics and unboxing video maybe

 

For people who installed an after-market SSD: how did you reinstall Windows? Recovery disks, or disk clone?

I am tempted to use the latter, because I have lots of programs and configs that I don't want to lose.. However, if I do that, will Windows recognise that it's now running off of an SSD, and make the requisite tweaks? And if do choose to clone disks, any recommendations on software? CloneZilla livecd?

 

This is the one I have.

I personally did a fresh install of windows, but if you dont want to go through all that, go to backup and restore center and make a system image to an external drive, and then create a bootable recovery cd. Pop in your ssd and the recovery cd, then follow the steps using the recovery cd to expand the image to the ssd. Its pretty straightforward

 

I cloned and then aligned.

 

I'm also waiting for the price drop on a large SSD. What do you think of the OCT1-25SAT3-1T? Can't see why it wouldn't fit and work but it's about £2k in the UK.

 

You might be waiting a while for the price to drop on 1tb drives. I dont suspect they will hit a mass market price point for at least 3 years. The price per GB will have to drop below .25$ to be affordable for most people.

 

It's a Vaio Premium Display, but not IPS. The display of the Vaio Z is also a Premium Display, but not IPS. And the other way round, the 15" IPS of the S15 is called a Vaio Display Plus, not Premium.
Colour space doesn't have much to do with IPS or TN. Both can cover AdobeRGB (like the Thinkpad 1080p display, which is an excellent TN display), but both can be 6bit ones which barely cover 40 % of it. Since the colourspace depends on the backlightning too.

Source? Simple, there is no maker of 1600x900 13.3" IPS displays on this planet. There are 13.3" 1080p IPS-displays, and 15.6" ones. Smaller of course too, but not 13.3" HD+. Also, you just need to watch the very few pictures and videos of the display, which show very clearly good viewing angles, but far from what an IPS display would exhibit.

It's a very good TN display, but still a TN. Premium Display does not equal IPS in Sony's lingo.

 

Im going to pick up a 512 in the next 6 months or so, waiting for the price to drop to ~70cents a gb.

 

I'm probably going to buy my SSD in Austria next fall when I'm starting my exchange year there. (For example the Samsung 830 is sold about 20% cheaper there.) Although I got only a 320Gb 5200rpm HDD to my S15, so that adds some motivation to upgrade it asap.

Do you know if one actually needs the spacer for a 7mm drive? Or can you just use the screws to attach it in the caddy?

Furthermore, are there any problems cloning the HDD after you've used it for some time? Does the cloned disks fragmentation slow down an SSD?

 

Well I finally took the dive and bought it! First time owning my own laptop. (Been an exclusive desktop user/builder since I game a lot, even made it through college w/o a laptop, just the desktop.)

Since I'm used to my own custom built PCs, my instinct will be to reformat and do a fresh, non bloated install of windows 7 and install drivers directly from different components' home websites (like nvidia). Then probably proceed to overclocking the GPU a bit hehe. Any reason I shouldn't follow this procedure? I'm not planning to change any hardware for a while.

How does it perform? (And what do you typically use it for?)

 

Sorry Wizzardexe, but can you post some picture of the screen with the netflix logo before and after you re calibration?
Sorry to insist...

 

The calibration does nothing to affect reds, they still look orange. The calibration just changes the white point of the screen, which was originally too warm for my taste.
...Id take a picture but my camera is very bad: when I tried to take a picture my laptop screen looked bright yellow (displaying a 255,0,0 red) and my desktop looked light orange (displaying the same red)

 

That's more like it. Can't wait to play D3 everywhere (gf's gonna hate me, haha).

I also received tracking number for my s13 today. It's been a long wait, but it seams it's slowly but steadily becoming a reality for a lot of people.

Thanks, Croak, on the heads up on being able to edit an .inf file for Nvidia drivers. I'll be looking into that.

 

so the small form factor of the s13, couple with the HD+ display, premium build quality, and 640m have pretty much got me in full blown "shuttup and take my money" mode

just have one question before i start pulling triggers..

via the european student shop i can get either the s13 or s13a with pretty much identical stats. Only difference would be the carbon vs magnesium, plus the possibility of a 2gb 640m with the s13a. Both also come with the battery extender free for students

the s13 would come up to roughly 870euros
and the s13a would be about 1040euros (or 1080 with the 2gb 640m)

is the 170 euros worth the upgrade in build quality?
ive never seen one of these (or its predecessors) in real life, but i understand even the normal s13 is pretty premium. no plastic in the chasis only alu + magnesium

any thoughts would be appreciated

gracias

 

Malmer - when you swap in the SSD are you going to grab the Sony drivers from the US site for the US model of the S Premium, or have you found Danish/Euro specific drivers/utils?

Petrov.

 

@Petrov: I have confidence that Windows 7 will provide most of the drivers. What's left, I'll try to find through what's been provided in this thread, quoted beneath.

I'll be sure to post what I did, and what was needed.

 

How do you align a cloned drive?

 

If you like extra heat, the fans on trying to cool the thing down and the GPU operating at a temperature that the chassis isn't designed for, then no reasons at all.

 

@ Steve, it's sure if you increase the value by 30-40% but 10-20% more will not change radically temperatures IMHO, more, if the laptop is pretty cool with no over clocking, it won't be, normally, dangerously hot.

 

I tried that, but Windows is trying to create an image of the Recovery partition too. For obvious reasons, I don't want that.. but I'm not sure how to deselect it.

Which software did you use?