Official Sony VAIO AW Series 18.4" Owners thread

That doesn't really make sense to me. The display isn't deinterlacing anything, the computer would be.

 

Oh - and I see from
http://www.datacolor.eu/en/products/...der/index.html
that Spyder3Pro is designed to work with 'Wide Gamut or LED' monitors.

 

Following up on some posts a little while back:
I have a suggestion for a laptop bag for these 18.4" beasts:
Targus XXL, £38.26
designed for models with screens up to 20"
51x44x11cm externally – which is within the specs for BA cabin baggage
http://www.microwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/item/V0005301

 

I took my AW into the Sony Style store on Friday and the "backstage" person is looking into it. I hope to hear something back from them by Tuesday. I really was fed up with trying to fix a brand new machine.

As for getting rid of Sony crap, I like your idea of putting on a plain vista cd and installing it. I will try that once the hardware comes back to me in working condition (crossing fingers) and get rid of all the crippleware vaio comes with.

 

Make sure you find all the utilities first and the order they are installed in!

 

I keep finding more versions of the AW series and its crazy how their model numbers dont have much rationale to them

http://www.provantage.com/sony-vgnaw190yab~7SNY90HY.htm

Any idea if this is a RGB LED screen.

it doesnt show up in this listing

http://b2b.sony.com/Solutions/subcategory/notebooks/multimedia/aw-series

for a minute, I thought anything with a "y" designation meant it had the RGB LED screen but I find this isnt always true.

ACK

 

I think from its price and the specs including 'Piano Black', it will be the RGB-LED version, but that's still not the kind of definitive answer you want, I know!
It might be a bit cheaper than some variants because it looks like it does not have the (expensive) solid state disks (just a single 320Gb hard disk).
I note 8Gb RAM is installed as standard, which is unusual; and because of that, I suspect they will have installed the 64bit version of Vista (am curious to know how well that runs on this laptop; drivers and application compatibility being the issue).

 

its really frustrating to say the least......

 

They all have 64-bit Vista regardless (in the U.S. at least).

 

Hi Everybody,

Being new on this discussion board/Topic I've got a little question to submit to you.

I know It must have been discussed before but being french believe me reading 91 pages of english is quite hard (and yes i'm seeing you saying lazy french !)

Anyway, I have a brand new AW11S bought quite in a rush after my thinkpad major crash...the AW11W was not available.

My question is : is it possible to change the hard drive easily.I am sure it can be replaced but is there some tricks to do ?

I'm planning to create the restore DVDs, will it be enough for re-installing the whole system on the new hard drive ?

Thank you all for your help!

 

Ah - that's interesting, and good!
Thanks.
That prompted me to check that Spyder3(Pro/Elite/print) would run in the 64bit OS...
...and sure enough, it does
(eg. http://www.photoshopsupport.com/photoshop-blog/07/2008/spyder-3-pro.html)

 

Hey Booville,

could you please email me those icc profiles you mentioned before so i can try them on the aw11xu rgb screen.. thanks

only got it for a couple more days as i am sending it back due to the screen flicker on the led screen....

but your profiles will help me decide if i should get the same model again or avoid the risk of problems with the led screens

been doing some digging and found people with dell, hp and apple LED backlite screens all having problems with screen flicker in one degree or another.. this post is from an apple board may shed some light...

Hello, while I cannot provide any relief for this problem I believe I can give you a technical reason it happens, so if you want to know why then read on.

I believe Apple is controlling screen brightness with PWM or pulse width modulation. Rather than changing the voltage to the screen which requires larger more expensive components PWM is very effective for most applications. Basically what it does is turn the voltage on and off very rapidly, this on off cycle can be very precisely controlled. The longer the off cycle and or the shorter the on cycles the lower the brightness.

Now here is where the trouble comes in. With CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) the bulb appears to be on solid at all brightness levels, this is because fluorescent lamps have a high persistence. This means that the bulb continues to glow for a fraction of a second after the voltage is removed, so when the PWM is in it's off state the bulb is getting dimmer but not going out completely and it's so quick that our eyes see it as a steady on.

Now LED's are extremely fast acting and stop emitting light within about a nano second after the voltage turns off. For PWM this means that at certain long off cycles the LED will go dark long enough for our eyes to notice it. Since we are talking about possibly hundreds of times a second we don't see a flashing light but more of a flicker.

It is possible that Apple may be able to fix this in software by modifying the PWM rates, they can control both the off and the on rates so if they make the off rate faster and the on rate slower they could get the same brightness levels at a rate where our eyes don't notice the off cycle as a flicker.

If they do not have full control of the PWM cycle setting or can't get a setting that our eyes don't notice the off cycles then I am afraid the only solution is to either view the screen at full brightness or change out the backlight for a CCFL model."

shame as its a great screen but i cant put up with the fault, there are alot of people that have found flicker with the led screens from various companies.. seems to be the luck of the draw to how sensitive your led/screen is when you get it to wether you get a noticable flicker every 2/3 mins..

not sure wether to risk another led backlite screen or revert to a ccfl dual lamp... but then i see people unhappy with the uneven lighting and bleeding from the edge etc... are the dual lamp screens good or bad?

thanks

andy

 

Thanks adybaines; I wonder how many people are not getting the flickering.

Does anyone have comments on the solid state disks in the top-end AW11's
- which SSDs are they ?
- any problems ?
- running cool and quick, as expected ?
- etc.

( SSDs are discussed in general on this thread -
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=208242&page=197 )

 

hi mike,

the laptop runs fairly cool... unless your crunching HD content then the graphics card heats things up but nothing more than warm on the left hand side... the uk aw's have vista 32bit unfortunately..

as for the sdd they seem to work fine boots very quickly and loads everything straight away from them..

i presume there are a high number of people with the led backlite screen that have not noticed/dont have any degree of occasional flicker... 3 - 4 of us have though problem enough to replace the machine.. if i go for another one hopefully it will be flicker free..

andy

 

Personally I've never seen flicker on an LED backlit screen, and of course probably all of us have been using them for years in one form or another.

Could be your eyes though being faster so to speak. (Not that I've seen this screen.)

 

No! Reading a 9000 page thread would be hard enough if it were all in your first language!

Hopefully someone who owns one will answer, but my understanding is it's very easy. You just unscrew a panel on the bottom, and it's mounted sort of like in a desktop system-just undo a few screws and screw in the new hard drive.

My understanding is the restore discs you make DO let you boot from them and restore to a new hard drive.

 

For evaluation purposes only, attached are two professional monitor profiles for the RGB LED screen only. One is 6500 / 2.2, the other is Native WP / 2.2. Brightness should be set at the first bar to get 120 luminance. Hope this helps.

Use these in the color management settings for Vista. Choose one or the other to be your default monitor profile.

Richard

 

I've actually taken out the bottom panel to see if I could add an additional hard drive (which you can't because there is not another sata connection).

But replacing the main hard drive looks easy just as you describe. It was pretty easy to take out the drive. Just image the drive using acronis and swap out the drive if need be.

 

Has anyone noticed that the sony vgn-aw190 laptop with RBG color correction, which is supposed to be the photographer'd dream, online colors are over saturated to the point where reds look like flourescent pink. It has turned out to be a photographers nightmare! I have spent hours on the phone with them and even worked with a sony service center supervisor who could not find the correct adjustment, if there is one. He wasn't even familiar with the screen. If anyone out there has this laptop please let me know if you have found a way to fix the over saturation. I am going to have to take this back otherwise.

 

you need to install the monitor profile as posted above. also, the default luminance is somewhere around 240... more than twice what it should be; hence, the colors will appear on fire.

In fact, most color experts maintain 90 is the correct luminance for a laptop. 90 on the AW = brightness set to zero.

Also, use a color managed browser like Firefox... not IE. That will make a world of difference. Just make sure you enable color management in firefox via about:config.

 

This is an intermittently-ongoing theme in this thread.
A similar problem exists with other high-gamut LCD screens, eg. on HP Elitebook, Dell Precision M6400, AFAIK.

It is because:

1. Your system is not calibrated, or not calibrated correctly.
Bear in mind, to be thorough, calibration needs to include gamma (and some calibrators don't do that part). So you might have gone through a calibration process, but it can still look garish if the gamma is off. Spyder3 (4 products in the suite; Pro, Elite, Print, Studio) does a thorough job of calibration - including gamma.

and/or

2. The apps you are using do not honour the ICC profile(s).
Internet Explorer, eg., is a culprit; but Firefox is OK.
Photoshop et al., of course, do honour ICC profiles.

and/or

3. Some other colour-related settings (eg. in the video driver) are askew (which could bugger things up even if calibration is good).

 

adybaines - re post#914 - thanks for your comments

booville - re post#917 - thanks v. much for posting your profiles

woodparis - re post #910 -

I know your model is not quite the same, but have you seen msquared's post #839 ?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4314469&postcount=839
I know it doesn't quite give an answer, but it sheds a little more light.
Good luck, and let us know if you succeed!

 

So, now that plenty of people have an AW in their hands, can we get an answer on whether or not it has an eSata port? The only eSata questions in this thread were pre-release and never answered. If I'm paying a premium price, I really would prefer to have an eSata port.

 

I looked at one in the store the other day and I did not notice an e-sata port. I know the HP HDX18 has one

 

I've just had a strange thing happen with my AW, I keep getting USB device Not Recognised I don't have anything connected to any USB ports. I have checked in device manager under USB controllers and I have 2 UNknown devices with nothing connected if I delete both I still get the error message 'USB device Not Recognised' and the 2 UNknown devices appear back under USB the controller, has anyone seen this before and know a fix. Thanks

 

I have AW11XU/Q (UK spec) and their is no eSata port on the machine and no mention in the manual either.

 

p.laver - it could be a hardware problem.

By way of example, regarding somebody else with your problem (on a different PC), the following discussion clearly pointed to that conclusion -
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/forums/index.cfm?action=showthread&threadid=259644&forumid=1&sr=21

I'm not sure if it is feasible for you to try the same action as in that case (disconnecting the USB socketry from the motherboard), since there may be no mini plug to disconnect.

But I would definitely have a word with tech. support.
But I expect they will ask if you have tried a system restore, so you may as well try that before you call (assuming you have a suitable restore point).

Meanwhile, you should be able to stop the problem temporarily by right-click->Disable on the offending device in Device Manager (if you were to delete it, it would just come back next time you reboot).

 

yeah - eSATA not built-in - darn shame!

But...
...you can get a ExpressCard eSATA card.
eg. http://www.ciao.co.uk/StarTech_com_2_Port_eSATA_ExpressCard_Drive_Controller_Card__6822932
It is not quite as neat as a built-in one, but at least it is do-able.
Look for an ExpressCard 34 (not 54) - as that's the type (width) of slot in the AW;
and try to get a SATA-II (300) version (not 150) - for maximum speed.
The ExpressCard standard theoretically allows 2Gb/sec, which provides plenty of ability to handle SATA-II.
Of course, you won't be able to have anything else in the ExpressCard slot at the same time.
(I have not tried this; it is just a suggestion.)

 

Hi everyone,

From my screen name you can probably tell I'm a Vaio fan, they are practically bullet proof and superior machines. I've ordered an AW11S/B which I should get on friday after trying to decide between the AW11M and AW11S I settled on the latter which has full hd and better graphical capabilities I believe...oh ok if you must know it's becuase it's glossy black unlike the M. HOWEVER! I noticed that whilst the hard drive is larger in capacicity it is slower at 4200rpm. Is this going to give me noticible performance differences in terms of load times if I have a large amount of music/photos I want to browse through? And if so is it possible to buy a new hard drive and replace the existing one?


If so how would I go about migrating all the data from the original 400gb one? i.e. so that the vaio has vista OS on the newer faster HD?

Also would I void the sony warranty if I did this?

Sorry one other thing, on some sites it says that the AW series have fingerprint readers... is this true? I can't find out anywhere for sure.

Many thanks for your help in advance and happy new year to all

 

you'd use an imaging software like acronis to copy over the content on the hard drive. i had to image a drive for the first time and the wizard made it real easy.

i called sony about removing my hard drive to replace and they told me i'd be voiding the warranty. i think this is their way of saying, "you should pay our tech department a lot of $$$ to install a new hard drive for you"

 

Hey joonshin,

thanks for your reply, ok so we'd be voiding the warranty...thats unfair...unless the new HD were to mess up they should warrant everything else no?... But if I keep the orignial HD and if anything goes wrong with the laptop I suppose I could just plug it back in so they'd be none the wiser..?

 

what i was told by a sony rep (btw, i hate their customer service. i just love their products) was that they only support the hard drive that came with the laptop. if i choose to install/replace the hard drive, then they wouldn't provide support for the new hard drive.

i totally agree with you saying it is unfair. i initially called sony to find out about getting a guide to adding an additional hard drive. the main customer service tech line said they don't have any information on that and only the repair office in san diego has the guide and it's internal. i'd have to pay $ to talk to the guys in san diego.

regarding the additional hard drive, it was found that on an earilier post that if your laptop came with only one hard drive, it has only one sata connector. if you configured your laptop with 2 hard drives, it comes with 2 connectors (for anyone that is wondering).

 

Hi

Has anyone had trouble with their fingerprint sensor? Mine has working brilliantly for the last 6 weeks that Ive had my AW11SB - but today all of a sudden for no reason I get a warning that a USB device is not recognised - and it appears to be the sensor which is no longer connected. I ran a virus scan (all clear)and defrag last night, and that is all that has changed - I've been working on it all day, for the error to suddenly appear. The laptop hasn't been moved all day so I don't think it can be physically disconnected! I'm not a techie by anymeans, so would appreciate any help you may be able to offer. For example, if I download the originally installed driver - where do I say it... I can seem to find the Fingerprint sensor in Device Manager.....

Thanks very much

 

thanks for this, I'm actually in the UK but the info you've given is much appreciated. I think I might leave the original 400gb 4200rpm hd and see how things go...then if I feel it's way too slow I'll change it. The thing is I don't think I've ever used a pc/laptop with HD speed below 5400rpm so I'm just thinking ahead. Did yours come with a fingerprint reader btw?

 

mine has a fingerprint reader. you might want to call sony yourself if you are based in the UK, they might tell you something different. honestly the rep i talked to seemed to know nothing about computers.

 

Thanks for the details! I was looking at eSATA ExpressCards a while ago when I was considering other options beyond the new Sagers. I guess it's not really a huge issue, but it is a bit of a bummer.

Cheers

 

hi

i just received my sony aw 190 from newegg. its a great laptop except the speakers seem to have some sort of problem. when i put the volume up to 90 percent or higher the speakers make a kind of vibrating/fuzzy noise. it's pretty noticeable when listening to music or when watchin

has anyone had this kind of problem before or have any ideas on how to fix this problem? thanks

 

Have you tried re-installing the driver for the sensor?

 

I assume you mean the RAID drives? If so I have that and it plays all sorts of HD 1080p video formats directly off the drives with no lag if that means anything to you. I can't imagine any music files could give it any trouble.

 

Thank you for this, yes I think we are talking about the same hard disks (the 400gb @ 4200rpm SATA hard drive on the AW11SB). If it plays 1080p videos with no lag that's good to know for me... but also I guess with 4gb RAM once the system has located the video file it would have little need to spin the Hard Disk no? Whereas if one is accessing a large volume of files at the same time (even though each one is far smaller in size) the drive might take significantly longer no? then say a 5400rpm or 7200rpm HDD. Sorry for my lack of technological terms.

I also found a thread somewhere comparing the performance between a 5400rpm hard drive and 4200rpm hard drive (same manufacturer, same set up... only difference was the HD rpm and capacity (the 4200rpm was larger)) and the graphs indicated a fairly negligible difference in performance between the two drives. But I don't know exactly what this person was doing to test these drives i.e. if they were just transferring some data and comparing data transfer time differences ... or comparing seek times so they mean something in practical terms...which I guess is what I'm looking for... I know the average seek times of 4200rpm drives are logically slower by some milli-seconds compared to 54 and 7200rpm drives...but I'm not sure how thats much it's going to affect me on the AW11S.

 

I tried a system restore back to the 24th when I know I didn't have a problem, Disableing was the first thing I tried that didn't work either. I've contact sony CS, waiting a response. I've also noticed the finger printer reader now has a problem, when I run it I get an error message 'No Biometic device was detected' not sure if both problems are connected. Tried the usual, repair/re-installing the biometric software still not working.

 

I have not done any benchmarking on the RAIDs so I cannot answer any technical questions.
As for spin, my AW is always memory drive swapping (a little orange flashing light indicates this). I think I read somewhere that adding more ram could reduce this but since it does not make any noise it did not worry me.

 

Hey all... new to this forum, and I took 2 days to work my way through this thread before posting. I just ordered my aw190 premium.

Thank you booville for the profiles. When mine gets here I will compare them to what I get with my older spyder2pro so I can decide if I need to replace it. I am afraid I will have to, as it appears that the "3" was updated to handle the wide gamut screens, but you never know.

 

I just received my AW-190JAH from NewEgg yestereday. After removing all the bloatware that comes with it, I plugged a USB mouse in, and noticed that the side buttons 4/5 (browser forward/back) buttons didn't work. Since I still felt it was slower than a clean Vista installation, I decided to do a clean reformat.

Clean reformat went mostly smoothly, and I had all my mouse buttons working... until I reinstalled one of the drivers, which disabled them again. I installed them one by one to find that it was the Sony Notebook Utilities set that caused it to happen. Problem half-way solved, although my media keys do nothing now. Acceptable loss, at least for me.

Then I had the infamous missing SD/CF reader issue with clean reformats, as I had read earlier in this thread. So I went and installed the 32-bit driver as I had read someone doing. Related or not, I don't know. But after a reboot, I noticed something strange - my fingerprint reader didn't work, and my USB mouse stopped showing up altogether in Device Manager, showing up as Unknown Device.

Removing the drivers manually didn't do anything. Deleting the device in Device Manager and letting it reinstall them didn't do anything. Then I rebooted from an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD, and found that the mouse doesn't work there either. I get a message: "connect-debounce failed" and disabling of USB ports on there, leading me to believe that my USB hub is failing. But then I plug in a USB flash drive, and it works just fine.

Further research suggests it could be related to wireless device being turned on, so I use the mini-switch to turn Wireless off, but that does nothing to remedy the situation. I've also gone into the BIOS and told it to reload the factory default (although I didn't change anything, nor is there much to change...). In the end, it's still not working for my USB mice (of which I've tried 2 so far, both of which work on this other computer I'm typing on currently) and the biometric device, which I'm guessing is also a USB device.

I'm currently restoring from the Restore DVD's that I had burned to see if the stock installation will magically re-enable the ports somehow, although that's a far-fetched hope, it sounds like.

I've read 3 other posts on this thread that make this issue sound like it could be a reproducible error... Can anyone shed a light on this at all?

On a side note, am I the only one that got a screen with dark spots on the LCD? I have 2 regions on the side of my monitor that are noticeably darker. I'm wondering if I got a lemon, or if that's pretty standard fare for a LCD this size.

 

Wow ! Sorry to hear about the problems with your AW190. I too bought mine from Newegg and have had it since 12/18/2008. Fortunately, I have not experienced any of the problems you are dealing with except one, which I have remedied and will explain shortly.

Being that this is my first experience with Vista, I still have a lot to learn but can honestly say it has been mostly positive. The only problem I have is compatibility with some games, i.e. Painkiller. Even after troubleshooting and performing the workarounds, all it got me was a sluggish computer and it was VERY noticeable. When I uninstalled the game, I too lost functionality of my media buttons as well as the numeric pad operations including the eject button on the number pad area. So I performed a system restore with a known problem free-pre Painkiller restore point and crap, same buttons didn't work still. So, I did a restart after the system restore and what do you know, everything works again and Vista is fast. I think I have a Painkiller coaster.

As for the USB mouse you are having trouble with, could it be not fully compatible or maybe needing a driver update for the mouse ? Just thought I would ask. You are using Ubuntu which I keep hearing about and leads me to believe your technical prowess exceeds mine as far as computers are concerned. I don't know enough about dual boots and advanced booting options, etc.

The fingerprint reader on my AW works most of the time but it seems you have to place the finger in just right because it is finicky. In most cases though it works after the second time. I never used one prior to this. As for the wireless, I use a Sprint EVDO USB modem with no issues and bluetooth stays on all the time and connects with my Logitech di Novo mini ( bluetooth keypad media controller/web browser device ) with no issues.

As for the screen, I will say that at least with my AW190, it is bright, even, and looks fantastic. I experience no light leaks, no dead pixels, and everything seems good. This is the best looking display I have ever owned and this is comparing to 2 other VAIO's I have owned.

The $1400.00 price I paid for my AW190 from Newegg is one heck of a deal and I am very happy with it.

 

I contacted UPEK Customer Support who manufacture the finger print sensor, they have been very helpful, I run their diagnosic software and system check and sent them the files, their response confirmed my worse fear's USB hardware failure, my bluetooth mouse no longer works because the 'device has become unpluged' vista error message when set to decovery and mobile phone won't sync via any of the USB ports either but I can connect memory sticks which is strange. Can you Let me know how you get on with the recovery disks if it works for you I might give it a try, if I send this one back I'll be on my 3rd AW.

 

Well, recovery was kind of scary.

When recovery rebooted, it gave me a Blue Screen of Death with the error "BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER". I shut the system down, waited 10 sec, rebooted, and it kept on working normally (weird...).

I had read some threads where they were saying that it may be that the internal USB hub may need to be disconnected. I thought that was overkill, so I decided to power it off entirely to let the power drain out of the motherboard. After restoration was complete (no mouse yet), I shut it down entirely, and unplugged battery, and unplugged it from the power. Held down the power button for good measure (too used to old-school electronics). After 30 sec, I plugged everything back in, and started it up. And I had mouse, and fingerprint reader back.

Since it was so darn slow, I reformatted back to clean Vista, and it's behaving for me still so far. Not going to install crap drivers again, I guess.

So which one did the trick, I don't know. Maybe the complete power drain, maybe the restore discs, maybe a combination of both of the above. Hope this helps someone out there, it sure would have saved me a lot of grief last night lol

 

Just a quick thought that popped in my head as worked my way through all the posts here:

If you are shopping and comparing the models that display the adobe RGB color space with the normal displays side-by-side, choose your content carefully. If you look at something captured in, or converted to the sRGB color space (most point and shoot photos, and almost all web content) I would expect not much differance between the two, if any at all.

 

Hi all,
I bought the AW11XU a few days ago and it looks that I have the same screen problems... Flickering every 1 to 1.5 minutes and extremely oversaturated reds! I have opened a support ticket with Vaio e-support and I will see how it will goes. Is it a screen defect or something that is common for led screens? Should I send it back for a replacement?
Thanks
Ioannis

 

If you mean between AW models, the biggest difference is the strong light leak on the non-RGB LEDs.