Official Sony S11/S12/S13 (2010) Owners Thread

Updated!
I was afraid of the update because of a bad experience with the Intel Wifi driver (I got constantly BSOD due to that update), so I decided not to change anything related with Intel's drivers. I know it was foolish

 

Last week I finally did a restore to factory image, due to audio stuttering and graphic driver problems. This really cured the issue, sound works fine now, and what I also noticed is that when you plug/unplug the power cord the screen goes blank, meaning probably that the intel driver gets reloaded, which must be a workaround for the problem I was having that the gamma did screw up and I needed to reboot.

However, a couple of days ago I got some defective sectors on the drive (merely 20 Kb) and I relocated those, all seemed fine again and now today the drive died completely. As always, SMART proved to be completely useless as it did now warn of any imminent failure. Oh wel... going to send that thing to Sony I guess...

Has anyone had any experience with the Intel 320-Series SSD drive on the Vaio S?

 

No worries - I update everything I ever can - rolling back is always an option However I never had any issue with any driver. I had complains about the newer version of Vaio Smart Network however, so I downgraded and am still using 3.1.0.11250. There is always a way What I wouldn't play with though is BIOS. I almost had to send my Vaio for repair because I decided to downgrade the BIOS version and it no longer recognized my HDD It took a night of headbanging, swapping harddrives, running utilities, etc., etc. to recover from!! But drivers - don't worry about them Updating usually either makes things better or makes no difference at all And if I notice anything negative, I always write it in the "database" (for example the video driver that causes problem on my machine but seems to run smoothly on other VPCS). If you see no comment - it means it runs fine If I notice something really different or a noticeable optimization - I also write it in the comment box

Glad you finally fixed it and that "my way" helped
Sorry to hear about your HDD. What was it? Toshiba? My Toshiba recorded 1 SMART warning 2 or 3 weeks after I bought the laptop. However I never sent it back and it is still working fine with the same warning nearly 1,5 Years later (as an external drive).

To be honest I would much rather use the opportunity to replace the drive with 7200 rpm or SSD, instead of sending the whole laptop to Sony... but on the other hand if you have time and can benefit from the replacement drive as an external - do it. The original Toshiba 5400 rpm is really slow. This was the first thing I upgraded...

 

It's a Samsung drive, don't know the exact model right now... I have the time this month so I'll send it in, but eventually will replace the drive with an SSD in some months...

 

Sorry if this has been discussed but this is a very long thread. When I use the docking station or the built in connection for an external display the image is flickery. I have modified the refresh rate but if you've seen refresh issues before this doesn't appear to be a screen refresh issue or the flicker one normally sees when there is a refresh issue.

I have more than one S and more than one monitor - the monitors work fine on anything else I connect them to.

I have the latest drivers.

Is there a fix?

 

I can only tell you that I don't recall this being discussed before... this either means not many people use docking stations and external monitors (I doubt the second) or it is an individual problem that you are having for some reason

 

I finally convinced myself to remove the lcd front bezel to check the situation underneath as I have been having some creaking every now and then.

I must say - removing the bezel and more specifically the bottom part is quite tricky! I almost gave up as I was afraid not to break something, but after 15 minutes of wondering, looking at it and trying - I finally managed to remove it.
Putting it back was much easier (1 minute job).

Anyway I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you have a reason to do so.

Turned out the thing that is "clicking" sometimes when I open my lid is a small cable that just needed to be relocated to the other side of a screw Now everything is fine with that. No more clicking.

The bad news is that I got one of the hinge-screws over-tighten while making sure they are all tight And the worst is - it wasn't the screw that went bad but the thread of the LID cover Fortunately it is the secondary screw but still... it doesn't hold much now :-/

Anyway everything was fine with the hinges, just a lot of dust around them and under the screen. I also seized the opportunity to put some oil/lubricate on them.

Apart from the over-tightening, it was useful to open, clean, relocate that cable and so on, but again - better don't do it unless you have a reason to. took me nearly an hour.

 

Hi Everyone,
My S13 (bought Jan 11) developed a "no operating system found" intermittent fault. Sony Support in Egypt was as much use as a chocolate teapot.
Amazon UK were brilliant and gave a full refund.
I am moving on to SA but wanted to say thank you as I have learnt a lot just by reading this particular thread, so wanted to say thank you.

 

You are welcome!! Good luck with the SA Glad you are still remaining in the Vaio "family"

 

Anyone tried the hardware encryption via ATA Password on Intel 320 SSDs with our Sony Laptop? My ssd worked fine till i activated the feater. Afterwards the SSD wasn't found anymore (check also http://communities.intel.com/message/135453). Therefore i guess the ATA password implementation on the Sony is not correct - i'm asking myself if that would be a reason to return it and get a refund (as i was nearly 2 days busy with that crap and havn't got the ssd back to working).

Nik

 

I haven't tried that, but I have my HDD fully encrypted which is for sure much more secure. Why don't you just encrypt the SSD and stop wasting time?

 

The whole ssd should be encrypted by this method. The alternative would be to use Truecrypt or anything else, but this wouldn't be hardware-acclerated and i really want the full speed of my new intel ssd

Nik

 

...And who told you it will not be hardware-accelerated??



http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=hardware-acceleration

 

yes you're right but not everyone has such a processor on board. mine is a intel i3 and this one doesn't support the aes instruction set. Therefore i want the hardware encryption of the ssd..

Gruß
Dominik

 

So what hardware acceleration do you expect if your CPU does not support it? Where should it come from?
I'm not aware of anything else there is and not really sure what you are trying to do
I don't thing you will notice any performance decrease using TrueCrypt on the SSD. I don't and I am with HDD - well yes it is 7200 RPM and my CPU provides Hardware Acceleration but you have SSD so...

 

Hi guys,

I bought this laptop a while ago and I'm happy with it. The only problem..... battery life.

I have the version with Nvidia Graphics and I would like to know if is there a way to use just the Intel Ingrated Graphics to improve this "issue".

Does anyone tried it before?

Thanks!

 

Sorry, but it's not possible.
At first - Sony disabled Intel GMA (it's somehow cut off from power).
And the second thing is that display is connected to GeForce connector not to GMA connector.

BTW What battery life do you usually get on you S?

 

Hi Aelavin,

At least now I confirm that this is not possible
I get around 3,5 hours with Power saving options. I would like to achieve 4 hours... (but considering the dedicated GPU is OK)

How about battery life in the new SB series in real world?

 

I just purchased an SA290X and it runs relatively hot whenever I'm playing video games. I purchased a Targus Laptop Chill Mat PA248U5 for about $20 from BestBuy to see if it would reduce the heat, and oddly, I don't think it is..? Laptop still ran around 85c-95c when I have a game up. Do the dual fans of this chill mat just not work well with this SA's vent placements..?

 

I'm using Battery Care, but 80% battery usually give me about 6h battery life of really light use (but it's with wi-fi mostly turned off).
With almost non-stop wi-fi turned on and surfing in web battery life drop to about 4-5h, but it's still ok.

Tested on balanced option with Intel graphics (Balanced).

 

I get 4-4,5 hours of battery life with my S (running NVIDIA), incl. WLAN turned on.

 

Does anyone know what height of HDD slot is using in the new Vaio S 190 and 290 series? As far as I know there are regular 9.5mm and slim 7mm version of 2.5" HDD that currently selling right now. So, If I buy either 190 or 290 series, what kind of HDD height should I looking for? Also, is that hard to replace HDD on our own? Anyone try it before?

 

Wrong thread buddy! Please pay attention, this thread is for the original S 2010 ONLY! there is a separate thread for SA/SB/SC/SD!

P.s. Can a mod please rename the thread to "Official Sony S11/S12/S13 (2010) Owners Thread" ? I'm getting tired of redirecting and reading spam here....

 

Hi Gracy123,

To get like 4hrs of use, have you made any other tuning to the laptop?
Have you measured the battery life with "battery bar"?, I think that the key here is to determinate the discharge rate.

Thank you.

 

No... haven't done anything. I did install battery bar out of curiosity a while ago but I found it extremely misleading and inaccurate and uninstalled it the same day.

I usually get around 3,5-4 hours (incl. WLAN) with 80% battery (where I usually keep it). If I discharge down from 100 I get approximately an hour more - so up to 4-4,5 hours total.

I think my record was ~5 hours but without WLAN.

Using WWAN on the other hand reduces these times with at least half an hour - haven't been able to squeeze out more than 3,5h when using WWAN.

 

I also managed similar times as Gracy123. It looks like S-series is less affected by turning on Wi-Fi (about 0.5h on S less in running time vs ~1h on SB)

 

Wow, that is weird!.
With maximum power saving options I get 3.5 hours (using 100% of the battery). Discharger rate with BatteryBar is around 15-20mW!!

Definitely I'm doing something wrong.
Any help is highly appreciated.

 

Battery bar is a bit inaccurate until the first full cycle. However, as I have batterycare enabled, I don't care for batterybar.

 

Screen brightness is the best "power saving" option you can use! I always use lower brightness when running on battery.
I don't use any other power saving options (except the switching off of the DVD-Rom which is enabled by default).
I don't even bother to manually switch to any other power mode.

 

From 80% Battery i only get 1,5 hours in balanced mode and about 2 hours in power saveing mode.

 

You either need to check what Processes/Software are loading your laptop that much or you have a bad battery. Anyway - 2 hours is not normal.

Besides that - power modes make absolutely no difference on my pc, I even did benchmarking to see how they influence productivity - absolutely no noticeable difference. I keep mine on performance all the time.

 

Does anyone already have a modified NVIDIA 285.62 driver? (or any other 285.XX?) ?

 

hello
does someone know how the internal dvd drive is connected to the notebook? ide or sata?
has someone replaced the internal dvd drive with a bluray drive? difficult?
thanks!

 

Remove it and see for yourself You just need to unscrew 2 screws and pull it out. But SATA if I'm not mistaken.

Not sure what anyone would need a bluray drive for in a 13.3 non-full HD laptop but it should be possible to replace.

 

Hi there, I don't know if anyone has been having the same issue as me with the recovery partition. But I wanted to delete it from my SSD after having made recovery disks, and leaving the original HD intact.

But it turned out that you can only delete the recovery partition while you are doing a clean install from the recovery disks. And some time ago, I simply cloned the HD to use the SSD, so that would be a problem.

The darn thing wouldn't delete. But I discovered that when starting to reinstall drivers from the recovery disk in Windows, Avira was blocking autorun, and the partition became visible temporarily. So I did that again, and took the opportunity first to format the partition, and then to delete it.

Then I had to move the reserved section, which I did with PartitionWizard after I had decrypted the drive with Truecrypt. Bingo. I have all the disk to use.

 

I am not sure how many still follow the thread (?), but here an updated version of the drivers database.

 

Hello guys.

I just got my Sony S Series 2 weeks ago and I've noticed some weird problems. I hope I can seek some help here.

1. I play this game call MapleStory, and the screen resolution of it is 800x600. Whenever I open this game, it screen loads into the 800x600 resolution for the game. However, sometimes, my whole resolution just automatically became 800x600, it's not the original 1366x788 anymore. I then have to go to the CPanel and change the resolution to its original one.. It's very troublesome. Some is there any solution to this?

2. Sometimes, when I load MapleStory, my screen suddenly become VERY bright. I mean VERY. I tried changing the brightness via CPanel but it will'll still be the kind of bright. Just different level.. I've to restart my computer to solve this problem. Any help?

3. And lastly, sometimes, my taskbar program image changed! I mean IE's image become the folder image and the folder image become the VAIO CARE image. Like everything's messed up. Got to restart my computer to solve this..

So is there any help that I can seek from my above 3 problems?
Thanks in advance.

Xin.

 

What is your model and configuration? It sounds like a software/driver problem to me.

 

i'm not sure what model or configuration it is...

 

Well, I can tell you one thing - it is the wrong model for this thread!! Mind the title ---> " Official Sony S11/S12/S13 (2010) Owners Thread".

Yours is a SA/SB/SC 2011 Model. There is a separate thread for those.

 

OMG :/ sorry ;(

 

My VPCS111FM Best buy model starting running slow
Anyone have guide on how to do clean install on it without all Sony junk?
Can we download Win7 64bit Home premium image and use the CD key underneath the laptop?

Thanks!

 

Hi
Apologies in advance as it’s been a while since I’ve posted – great to see this thread still going!

A couple of questions if I may:-

Has anyone changed their hard drive for a SSD flash drive? If so can this be done without losing the optical drive?
Also has anyone upgraded the optical drive to Blu-ray? I would like to do this but not sure what drive to buy??

Finally I know there are new S series models now, but my Vaio update never seems to have any new updates – is this right?

Any advice on the above greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Keef

 

Hi keefa73,

straight to your questions:

1. I don't see why you would lose the optical drive if you don't want to? Just replace the HDD with SSD and that's it. You can optionally replace the optical drive with a HDD tray in order to use a second drive, but this is entirely up to you, you don't have to.

2. Can't help you with the blu-ray - I'll never know why one would need one (especially on non-Full-HD display and with memory sticks becoming cheaper and cheaper)

3. Vaio update isn't really that reliable (at least my experience has shown that) - I removed it long time ago. Just visit the Vaio Support page for your specific model and check for updates. I update a drivers' database which you can find attached in one of my previous posts - compare your driver versions to those I have listed there. That's the reason I have created it - to keep track of drivers . Sony is no longer supporting this model in terms of updates and drivers so we are on our own

 

Hi Gracy

Many thanks for the reply

I quiet like the idea of upgrading to SSD sometime in the near future (when the price comes down a bit!)

I hear what you’re saying regarding the Blu-ray drive and the screen - I just wanted the flexibility of watching movies on a larger display via HDMI out - but doesn’t seem like I can find the correct drive
(the slim 9.7mm one I think) for a reasonable price.

I have found your drivers' database – very useful so thank you


K

 

This may be a bit late but i saw that some people installed a wwan card into this s11. I was wondering, is this a mini pci-e that hey are installing this gobi card?

If so is it possible to add a different mini pci-e card in there (oh i don't know... like an ssd ). I know it was asked before but i actually never thought there was a slot left for this.

second question, i'm having trouble with bluetooth to connect to anything. The bluetooth will send a signal (which can be picked up by other devices) but the laptop won't find devices nor is it possible to initiate or maintain a conection (initiated from either device or laptop). Does this sound familiar to anyone? I tried other bluetooth software and even updated drivers with the generic qualcomm driver but it was a nogo. (wifi is still working though). I was considering just leaving it untill i reinstalled my os on a ssd but it's getting quite annoying (i bought a bluetooth mouse i'm not able to use now)

 

Your first question - no clue to be honest. I have and use the WWAN so no idea, but browse back, I think it was discussed.

Bluetooth -no, never had any problems with it and I use it every now and then. Try different drivers (there was an update on Sony's support site, which is now out of date, but reverse back to it and check. There was also a firmware update of the bluetooth provided by Sony. Check it out.

 

justice strike,

yes, theres is a slot for miniPCIe card inside. However, if you want a modem you will need to make antennas by yourself, second - after installation you have to enable it as a hardware - there is tiny switch on motherboard, it should be placed in position "on", third - you will have to make a hole for your sim card inside the chassis (it is not an easy as it is made of very hard magnium alloy) - it is better to use miniPCi with embedded SIM holder (but in this case you will not be able to change your ISP unless you disassemble the chassis again to replace SIM). A year ago there was a youtube video, but I checked it now, sorry it was deleted. Personally I never proceeded in this way (I mean installing HSPA modem), because S11 has an expresscard slot where you can insert any modem you like in 2 minutes, including software installation, of course.





This is how it looks with two different modems (Option 441 and Asus T500 with voice support).

P.S. IMPORTANT: Here are the photos of the dissambled unit of VPC-S11, please follow the link:

http://forum.ixbt.com/topic.cgi?id=17:38933-17

You are welcome to use translate.google.com (Russian is the original language) to check the phases of installation of miniPCI modem.

 

Aiga, I think you did not quite understand his/her question! Read the following again:

He/She is not looking into installing a WWAN card if I understand correctly.

But still very useful information, so thanks for your submission!!

 

Ok. I might have misread it then. If one uses the model with internal WWAN on board, there is no problem at all, just replace the card, the only thing which is crucial that the new card must be the same form: miniPCIe modem card. As I know, for Vaios there are no white or black lists of suitable modems, unlike for Lenovos. Half-size miniPCI cards (of the same form factor as mSATA SSD cards) won't fit.
P.S. Just corrected the first version of this message.