Official Sony VAIO AW Series 18.4" Owners thread

My wife liked the laptop so much that we bought another one. Sony gives a students a small discount so we got the same laptop without the blu-ray burner for 300 bucks cheaper. 1750.00. Not a bad deal!

 

Can't beleive I haven't seen this mentioned before. I'm finding using the AW11Z/B very awkward on my lap as the trackpad is well off-centre. Anyone else finding this a complete pain ?? The pad is centereed with respect to the qwerty keys but since we have a large numeric keypad now this means the portable cannot sit centereed on my lap in use.

Ian

 

Apple Safari support colour management

 

Thanks for the info, I'm gonna contact the DABS and get a swap out as I can't live with the flicker

 

Anyone know who manufactures the touchpad? e.g. Will it be able to support multi-touch???

 

I believe most Sony's use Alps touchpads (Synaptics has been seen too though)

 

You can also enable color management manually in Firefox 3 as follows (easy):
1) Type about:config in Firefox 3's address bar and press Return. The configuration settings will appear.
2) In the Filter field, type gfx. The list of settings will shorten to show just those related to graphics, ie gfx.
3) If the Value for gfx.color_management.enabled is False, double-click anywhere on that line to toggle the setting to True.
4) Quit and relaunch Firefox 3 and you're in business.

 

Hello,

I am interested in vaio AW11 S / B but I found that the hard drive is running at 4200 rpm (they have no shame at Sony!

Can you tell me how to install an SSD in place? and whether it will be recognized by the bios? and how to configure the bios?

I went through the forum, but I did not answer.

Thank you in advance for your answers.

Erick

Sorry for my English, I usually speak French.

 

You don't set anything in the BIOS, it works like any other hard drive.

 

Thank you for your answer, but I need a little more explanation.

On the official forum of assistance Sony, a member said about vaio AW11 S / B

"If you intend to put a new hard disk (SSD), forget it impossible to change itself in some bios! No option on the cache, for example, or even disable the AHCI! "

Is this true?

Thank you in advance.

 

I don't know what that means, what they were talking about. You don't set anything in the BIOS when you're installing a hard drive. The old drive is SATA, and so is the new one.

 

Hello everybody!
I'm looking for some information about AW11S...
For job reasons, and also because I really don't like Vista, i need to buy a laptop where it's possible to install WinXP. The Sony staff of course tells you it's not possible, but I found some clue on internet about people who actually changed the OS to XP.
Do you have any more precise information if it's something possible? Anyone did it?
And, a question for people who have it: how do you carry it? I checked the size and it won't fit in any case I've got... Do you find that the size is excessive? Sometimes I take my laptop with me on the airplane, I'm not sure they will agree to let me take a computer bigger than my hand luggage...

 

You can do this on any laptop, on any computer with any operating system.

I would really like to know the answer to this too!

 

Fits in my 17" laptop bag for some reason... guess my bag was just big...

Edit: I think it's cause it's not THAT much bigger than a 17" only diagonal, so you can cram it inside most 17" bags I'd imagine.

 

As far as I know that's only if you install XP that you run into AHCI trouble, not a new drive itself.

 

Hi, thanks for the answer.
Well, actually I don't know if it's my 17" that's smaller than the usual, but this 18.4" is about 4cm longer than my actual pc and it doesn't fit in any place...

 

I know it's just a matter to find the drivers, but since this laptop is new I was wondering if the hardware producers released the XP drivers...

 

OK

Thank you for your responses.

Is it someone already has a hard drive 10 000 rpm in its Vaio AW11?

They are a little thicker. 9.5 mm for a 7000 rpm and 15 mm for a 10 000 rpm.

Sorry for my english :-(

 

a 10.000 rpm drive in a notebook? my strong guess is the thermal design is not sufficient anyways.

I finally decided to get the AW11S/B, and now it's sold out at SonyStyle! grr

btw, anyone knows what the second letter means? I mean this: AW11S/ B, AW11Z/ B, AW11M/ H, AW11XU/ Q

 

You sold out your AW11S ? (if i understood)

But i think if you change just the hard drive by a WE scorpio 320go 7200 rpm 16Mo SATA, it's a very very good notebook !

 

Good point, I would also like to have XP on it, but then again a machine of this standard (b/z) should be able to run Vista just fine...

and remembering Direct x10 is only "officially" for Vista (Although there seems to be an XP port to it)

There only seems to be Vista drivers on the site
http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/downloads/preinstalled/preinstalled.asp?site=voe_en_GB_cons&m=4568

Noticed on the manual that you might get a free remote with it maybe?
ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/pub/Manuals/Notebooks/AW1/AW1_H_EN.pdf


Anyone know the manufacture of the touchpad yet??
Cheers

 

Well, I have no doubt that this machine can handle Vista without problems... But, I have to put XP for two reasons: first, for compatibility with programs used in the office; second (and even more important for me), I used Vista for some time trying to fix a problem on a couple of computer and I simply hate it. The more Windows advance, the less the user can use his own computer... so, I want to be the master of my pc and decide what it must do and with Vista you can do simply what it permits you to do...
Ok, a third more objective reason: a machine with this hardware will work fine with Vista, then with XP it will be a rocket!

 

There is no mobile 10,000 RPM drive. The current Western Digital Velocirapter is physically smaller than a normal desktop drive if you took it out of it's...case...thing...but it is NOT supposed to ever be taken out of that (voids the warranty), and it's NOT supposed to be used as a mobile drive, even if you could get it to fit.

You would of course void the warranty on both the drive and the computer by trying to use that, even if you could jam it in there.

 

I got a chance to play around with a lower end model at American yesterday. Here's some random observations:

-The screen's resolution actually doesn't seem too terrible. I hate these super high resolutions on small screens, but I guess the extra 1.4" combined with Vista makes it seem pretty decent. In Word, blowing up the display of 12 point Times New Roman to 150% resulted in text appearing to be very legible.

-I had some strange unresponsiveness at times, but I'd chalk that up to all the garbage running on it-it even had "limewire" on it? Isn't that some file sharing app? I'd assume someone in the store installed that, and not Sony...but there was a ton of garbage running on it.

-I hate chicklet keyboards, but this surprisingly seemed good...for a notebook keyboard. Though it looks almost the same, it seems far more usable than the new Macbook Pro's keyboard, which I also played with at the same time.

-WinDVD is included with it, and while it seemed to work just fine (they had a BBC disc in the drive that looked great) as someone mentioned, that program causes the display to switch from aero back to the old display as long as it's loaded.

Someone mentioned putting updated Nvidia reference drivers on it causes it to crash instead of changing display modes...so that's pretty lame that they're apparently including an outdated DVD/Blu Ray program on there.

-Build quality seemed great. It seemed to have less "flex" and all that than many 14" notebooks I've played with, despite dwarfing them. It's also very thin (hopefully not too thin!)

-As has been mentioned, there were virtually no options in the BIOS. I've never seen so few BIOS options in a modern computer. I can kind of see why they'd do that though, and I'm not really sure what I'd be missing (although come to think of it...I didn't see options to enable or disable USB/PS2 emulation and things like that, which are absolutely needed for some programs I run). Hmm...I hadn't thought of that...without that this system actually wouldn't work for me.

I'm also ticked it doesn't ship with a clean OS CD like Dell, Gateway and Asus (?-not sure about Asus) do.

So...kind of impressed, but it's still a lot of money, and I have so many questions about it :-/

 

perhaps the computer was set to balanced power setting and not top performance? I noticed that when I set it to power saving or balanced perfornance is not always smooth at times.

 

Cant agree more with ascariss. And remember, you need to ALWAYS plug the power supply if you want the fastest performance.

For me, If i am doing intensive photo editing session or playing intensive 3d gaming (Call of Duty World at War, Fallout 3, Dead Space, Red Alert 3 - most settings in High with 1920x1080 resolution) , I will need to plug in the power supply otherwise my FW is crunchingly slow.

 

Just bought the VGN-AW11Z/B (UK Model) How do I get Vista Ultimate onto this beast ? It ships with Home Premium which is no good to me. I copied the Program Files/Sony directory off onto a data stick, performed a clean install of Ultimate but running the Recovery tool (VAIORecv) from the Sony directory gives an error (Error 505:41) when attempting to install any of the Programs (all drivers listed in the tool seemed to install ok)

The Sony website only lists drivers for this model - no programs such as the network setting util etc etc. So right now what I have is a clean install of Ultimate but none of the soft keys work etc.

 

If I remember correctly my AW190 was set to either 'power saving' or 'balanced perfornance' by default.

The touchpad has a sluggish feel to it even at top performance however, thank goodness I use a mouse instead.

 

Hi Konnexion,

Spent quite along time on this.

Basically in essence this machine is the same as the US version

esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNAW190&SelectOS=36

These are 64bit drivers, 90% work well, 10% dont

If you look at this thread

orum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=318134

You can get the rest of the drivers

Incidentally the bit Sony.WIM file, contains the main drivers hidden inside the windows folder

Let me know if this works for you, Mine is fully working with everyone and blindingly fast!

Put the http in front of the links

 

Ok, excellent, thanks for that, I'm going to rebuild with 64bit Ultimate using the drivers you pointed me at above.

Now you mention sony.wim above. Presumably this is only relevant if I wish to rebuild with x86 Vista Home Premium - the OS that's in the Recovery Partition and on my Recovery disks ?

 

This ran fine, but then all of a sudden got unresponsive, sort of in bursts. I doubt it was the hardware-probably just all the bloat installed on there. I don't even know that it was Sony installed bloat-I mean limewire? Probably just people messing around with it.

 

I don't know, my FW ran fine with the bloatware even installed so not sure it as software connected. Boths fw at futureshop were set to balanced when I checked last time.

 

Yeah, but Limewire? That isn't something Sony would include, is it? This may have been gunked up with who knows what from people messing with it in the store. I really doubt it had anything to do with hardware...at least I hope not!

 

I ordered today at Sony Style and will get my AW 11S/B on monday. I will post a little review then and can answer questions

 

Oooh, oooh, Fold on it! Pretty please?

 

My AW runs terribly on Balanced and Power saver. Works flawlessly on High Power.

Limewire certainly was not included on mine, and it's a super slim to none chance that it was placed there by Sony for the demo model.... Most likely some kid who came in and was being stupid. I remember a day at Best Buy which I brought my flash drive and actually installed, stood, and watched 3DMark06 on the Gateway FX laptops. That made the sales kid LOL.

But hey, it was a good purchase.

 

Just wondering... limewire - as this is peer to peer software mainly used for illegal services, couldn't ths hurt Sony? You may want to make them aware of that.
__________________________________
PS: Peer top peer discussions are not liked in this forum - we do not need to elaborate.
And just for the record - I don't use them.
__________________________________
Bringing in something like 3dmark is actually a god idea - I mean, nobody can complain if you with to know how powerful a computer you plan to buy is, isn't it?

 

That's my impression, but I'm not really familiar with that kind of thing, I've just sort of heard the name.

At any rate, yeah, I was almost certain it had nothing to do with the laptop, just it being misconfigured and gunked up. (I suspect most Windows problems are just people not knowing what they're doing, because mysteriously I never have them on and of the systems I support. It annoys me when clueless people bash Vista and go on about how wonderful OS X is).

 

I am having issues hooking up my aw190 to my samsung 1080p. The screen on the tv is cut off along all 4 edges. It is like it is zoomed in a little. I called sony and they were no help. I tried changing the display settings in vista and in the NVIDIA display settings and no luck.

Does anyone have a solution!!!

 

How are you connecting it?

 

I have it hooked up with an hdmi cable

 

I've been dying to see a full review on this. Saw a HP X18 at the store the other day and the keyboard had so much flex on the number pad that I just wasn't comfortable with it. If the review is good I'll pull the trigger on Sony AW for sure.

Thanks.

 

I have connected my AW to a panasonic 850u 1080p and there is no cut-off around the edges, in fact it the entire screen is visible from top to bottom and from left to right.
This is because my Plasma is set 100% size, I suspect your tv's is on the default size that all tv are on, which is 95% (in other words HDTV overscan) and not because of any setting on your notebook. Check your manual to see how to set your tv to 100%.

 

Got my AW from Sony this Week. My only complain, and this is a pretty big complaint, is that there is a vibrating sensation coming from where I have to lay down my left and right palms on the laptop. This comes from both sides, on the left side and right side of the trackpad. Not sure if this is the HD spinning or from a fan, or the cd or what? There is no CD in the drive all. The vibration is very tiny but its enough to numb out my palm after a few seconds, feels almost like an electrical current. If it is the HD spinning, my question is why in the world is the HD spinning all the time continuously as the vibration never lets down?

Any other AW owners could please send me your experiences, I love this laptop but this is making it almost unusable.

 

Left palm rest is the HDD in most laptops.

Why is an HDD spinning all the time:

Takes less power to keep it moving than to stop and start again - also, Vista may be organizing itself.

 

I will ty that out, but I even went and brought my notebook to circuit city to try it on a panasonic 85u 1080p that i am thinking about buying and it did the same thing, but that could be because of the 95% thing you were speaking f.

 

You were right about the overscan. Unfortunately the tv that I currently have does not have the 1:1 ratio option, but I am assuming when I buy the new panasonic 85u 1080p that I will be able to change it.

Thanks

 

Whatever it is it doesnt stop at all. The HD orange light is flickers on every second and I can feel it on both sides of the trackpad. Why would Vista be organizing? I have barely anything on there. How long would the organizing take? I've had the laptop on for over 3 days now.

 

Is there any way to change the power settings to stop the HDD from spinning all the time?

 

Try defragmenting your HDD.

Then what about Virus scans?
Indexing?