Official Sony VAIO F Series Owners lounge *PART 2*

If you do a clean install, why waste HDD space with a recovery partition that is good only to go back to a factory state that you don't want anyway? :confused2:

Check this: How to Create a Recovery Partition with Image of Windows 7 DVD?

 

No one has a comment of for this one? I am interested as well.

 

I don't think Sony do on-site repair in the UK - at least I've never heard of one. You'll almost certainly have to send it off...

 

Do they do it for Costa Rica? The tech could go to the beach or jungle after the repair.

 

Hi,

I've been reading faithfully for about three weeks, but this is my first post, because I just got my new, US, CTO today. i7-820, 4 Gb Ram, 1080 screen, 360Gb - 7200 HD. So far it is great!

I admit I have 55 year old ears that listened to a lot of rock and roll, but I can't hear a fan whine, or a morse code sound. The screen seems about what I expected from a laptop. Very good when you are at the exact right angle, dark when you move your head down (relative to the screen) and a little washed out as you go up. I do have a GretagMacbeth profiler, and that definitely warmed up the screen. Way too much blue without it.

First order of business was hooking it up to our 42in panasonic 720 p screen, and the sound via "optical out" to the surround sound, and playing dirt2. Great experience!

My only beef with this system is that Sony has started offering them with free Blu-ray players. I didn't order one, don't own any Blu-rays, and don't picture ever moving in that direction, but knowing it is available for free...

I called Sony and my only recourse is to return this unit and order another (probably in reverse order). I'd be out about $30 for shipping and insurance, and I'm not honestly sure a Blu-ray player is even worth $30 to me...it just bugs me I just missed it.

By the way, I have confirmed here in the US CTO's may be returned for 30 days as long as you didn't get engraving.

I am really happy with the computer so far.

Gary

 

Congrats & welcome to the F Owners Lounge!

"I am really happy with the computer so far" - If you are happy with your F and don't care for BD, why risk returning it, pay $30 & get an other unit that could have some problems or dead pixels, for example?

 

I'm with Joe on this one, 'cept TN LCDs have a very low failure rate these days, I wouldn't be worried about dead pixels.

You won't notice the whining/morse code/whatever else unless it's REALLY quiet in your house.

 

Wow, I knew about the engraving catch, but I may have been misinformed by customer service - I called during the 30 day period and he just kept repeating "all sales final" when I mentioned a refund. I'll make sure I mention the US policy when I call them next. Thanks for the info

 

You'll find all the drivers in my thread, see sig.

 

Okay, my vaio just went black and the table on which I put it on felt very hot. I was playing a few youtube 1080p hd movies at once for a while and I guess it overworked itself? Now I had to reboot the comp by pushing the power button, windows has booted up to vaio recovery center though. Is this normal (never used win7 before, in winxp you it would just reload windows again), or has something worse happened that would make me get this menu?

On my left I got vaio hardware diagnostics, restore c:drive, restore complete system and rescue data...

 

I don't know, but you may be covered by a similar law to the UK's Sale of Goods act if there's a real problem, as is described in the first section on this page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8253915.stm

 

Just restart again, when Windows detects it didn't shut down properly last time, it'll bring up a menu with a ~15 second timer asking if you want to go into the recovery center, and I think you let it time out.

That said, your computer overheating is NOT normal. I'd check your logs to see what caused the crash (if it was overheating), and call Sony because your fan or cooling system may be malfunctioning (they might not have applied a proper amount of thermal paste)..

A couple of youtube videos is nothing, lol. I've had my Vaios through quite a bit already (2 days of playing around with different OSes == tons of optical and HD activity), they never skipped a beat.

Sooo yea...

 

Exactly...I really like it. I suppose it is good to have missed out already on a better deal/upgrade. Now next summer when the refreshed model comes, I won't feel as bad...some of the sting will be gone.

PS It is really fast.

Gary

 

AND you have ears to hear. I do find it to be more and more true that if people would quit mumbling I hear fine...

Gary

 

I'm quite a noob, where would I need to go to check these logs? For now I'm running the vaio hardware diagnostics in vaio recovery center... so far so good, cpu tests indicare ok, no errors detected.

 

Triton77, there is different CTO return policies for Canada vs. USA:

See: Sonystyle CANADA CTO Return Policy

It's written in B&W on Sonystyle.ca: Returns & Credit Policies wich is linked when you order a CTO.

Sony_is right in your case, sorry!

 

There is a big warning to be added here: you are linking to non-Vaio_F_Series certified by_Sony drivers and the Rapidshare links are not updated to the most recent drivers like you can find when searching for your specific F model on Sony_Support..

I would add: check those too:

Sony_Support Clean Install Instructions for Windows 7:

And found in the UP: Clean Install. Joe Bleau’s unification.

 

Please read this post: VAIO_F_Series Lockup on Youtube?

"... and the table on which I put it on felt very hot..." - the free SIW & PC Wizard I suggested to you offer temperature monitoring. Check also: VAIO_F Cooling Pad vs. Any Object & F w/o Battery. My desk is never hot except during some private events which I won't describe here.

 

Thanks for clearing that up Joe.

 

That's not true Joe, the three times a driver became corrupted on my system VAIO care chose just the drivers needed from that recovery partition. (they weren't in WIndows' Driver Cache) It is the repository for all the software and programs as they existed at the time of shipping. For me that includes Premiere 4.1.1 and the Corel stuff, plus Windows of course. It's not "All or Nothing."

Note you can do an INCREMENTAL repair or install from the recovery partition, I'm not sure about the DVDs (other than the extraction trick.)

 

Maybe you did not follow the link?

That OEM recovery partition will not contain your manually added software & customization.

And you can still do what you mentioned (... incremental repair) by simply running Vaio_Care on your F while inserting said recovery discs.

Note that my post was directed to somebody wanting to do a clean install but the linked Microsoft article is still very interesting IMHO.

Edited to add: Other interesting read: Windows 7 - Creating a Media-less Recovery / Installation Partition and Windows 7 - Recovery Partition - Create.

 

2 months?

Massive p¿sstake!

Even more worried now, just have to hope I get lucky with mine..

EDIT: just read the "you may not return a Product and claim a refund if the Product concerned is a personalised Product" in the terms & conditions, they should make that a bit clearer when ordering, didn't occur to me that I would need to read all that crap..

 

It's not HOT hot, it's just quite warm. I was streaming three 1080p youtube vids at once and one running in full screen btw... just to see how the comp would handle it (smooth as hell btw. fans were getting louder though). But all of a sudden it just went black.

These are the event ids:

One critical: event id 41, source: kernel power, log: system. "the system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed or lost power unexpectedly."

FOUR errors: 2 event id 7 errors, source: VzCfbSvc, log: application. "Failed to load the plug-in module. (GUID= (lots of numbers and letters)".

event id 7009, source: service control manager, log: system. "A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the roxio upnp server 10 service to connect."

event id 6008, source: Eventlog, log: system. "The previous system shutdown at 0:15:37 on 24-03-2010 was unexpected."

There's also two warning 1001 and 1004 souce: msi installer.

EDIT:

I am using SIW now. I see 'value', 'min' and
max'. I assume if the value temp exceeds the max, something is wrong (or is it normal to be a few degrees above 52-54?)? I'll try doing the same youtube thing again and see what the temperatures are.

EDIT: just read the european review in the unifcation post. the min max values on swi can't be the general criteria of the temperature for cpus, since they're talking about the temperature of the cpu cores being acceptable at 82 degrees celcius. On swi it's showing rates of 45 and 50-something... probably numbers indicating my highest temp logged since my last reboot?

Also "The base plate can exhibit higher temperatures. Following a high load, we measured 44.9 degrees Celsius around the heat pipe. This high but still acceptable surface temperature however only applies to certain areas. Most areas of the base plate rank between 23 and 30 degrees."

Yeah that's what I meant by my table being 'hot'. Felt around 40-45 degrees celcius. The surface on which it has stood for a day feels about the same as my ps3 slim...

 

From the post I linked to: "Are you using Google Chrome? Does it do it with Internet Explorer 64-bit & also with Firefox?"

Search on the web your event id's adding to the search terms: "windows 7" 64-bit.

 

I'm trying to set up the F11 as the new all-purpose multimedia editor and general production tool. However two problems are that, first, Win7 is 64-bit, and most legacy software is 32 bit only. Codecs are mostly 32 bit and they will not run in a 64-bit program anyway, yet some system calls in Win7 for displaying and frameserving such files are 64-bit only (I'm not the expert on this)

The second problam is that win7 will not work with any build of Visual Basic 5, yet so many programs were written in that language (MSVBVM50.DLL is the classic required file)

So, I installed and ran the virtual machine and downloaded the copy of 32-bit XP to which we Win7Pro users are entitled, and, voila! now ALL the legacy programs run properly, even video capture.. The screencap shows the BeSweet encoder, which was written in VB5 and will NOT run under any flavour of Vista or Win7.

For just $50 more than Win7Premium this was yet another bargain of an upgrade available at the time of ordering a CTO, and which presented a capabillty which has just saved my behind.. :smile:

When ordering a CTO I highy recommend Win7Pro just for such scenarios, plus it allows for the use of "Fresh Start.." - no unwanted trialware to remove..

 

Are you collecting Rapidshare points or something?
You should change your links.

SONY Drivers Site: http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/index.pl

SONY Drivers/Software FTP: ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/pub/VAIO/ORIGINAL/

 

Thanks MelodyMaster, this makes me glad I did order Win 7 pro and got fresh start!
Although I have to wait until April 13th for the CTO to ship

The premium screen is delaying it from 30th to 13th!

 

I think I was lucky to have rather sensitive ears and pretty decent eyes too XD

 

hmm especially the kernel power error (event id 41) seems a hot topic.. google gave me so many bsod results and topics on this on forums...

Everybody there's just guessing though: drivers? hardware? (seems unlikely, every situation is the same: new pc with win7 or upgrade to win7 -> BSOD within days/hours).

Your post talking about people with win7 encountering lockups during youtube playback seems to be MY culprit/instigator of the BSOD and this error though. A few days ago the same happened when we played a file on youtube. I thought it was the battery because when I rebooted it had 2% left, but it seems that was not the problem.

One thing's sure: definitely not because of overheating. I opened even more youtube windows and after running them for 15 minutes, the cpu does not get hotter than 65 degrees whilst temp of gpu did not go above 60 degrees celcius.

 

First of all thank you for this thread, it is really very useful.

Can someone solve my latest doubts:

- Gray or black?
- Should I buy the sony ssd or worth it more to buy one for myself?
- If you order the Win7Pro, does it come a dvd copy of the operating system?

 

Good for you. I agree that if going the CTO route, that's $50 well spent for Win 7 Pro + the Fresh Start option.

Note that if one bought a preconfig F with Home Premium:

- try to run the software under XP compatibility.

- try the free VirtualBox alternative

- upgrade via Anytime to Pro or Ultimate (both include virtual machine but Ultimate also includes OS representation language packs).

- or simply update your old software.

 

Searching for BSOD is like searching for kitten on Youtube.

Since you will not answer my web browser question: good luck!

 

Oh sorry, i thought you were just copying and pasting the topic (and therefore it's title from back then). I wasn't aware you were asking me the question: I use firefox... have not tried ie or google chrome yet.

I'm wondering whether I should return this in case this IS a hardware problem... one thing: during the googling I saw people posting minidump files to let experts view them to determine the problem. Where would I find these 'minidump' files?

 

About the 1est question, do we know if we are gonna have premium black in USA?

Thanks

 

In Canada DEFINITELY get the SSD, it's a bargain..

 

run memtest, prime95, and Vaio sytem diagnosis to test for issues, as I did after the third time a driver failed. (No problems) I've never had YouTube crash - or cause a freeze.

 

Make sure you download drivers compatible with your Vaio_F_Series specific model!

I suggest you: Start > search: Create Restore Point and create one before installing anything, so you can go back easily to your current system state in case of a problem.

VAIO_Event Service Update: "The system does not properly adjust the image size to fit the TV screen when connected to HDTV via an HDMI connection". Note: 2.89MB, restart after installing.

Sony_certified NVIDIA GeForce 310M/GT 320M/330M Video Driver Update: "Improves HDMI compatibility..." & other stuff. Note: 94.6MB, installation note says: uninstall your current Nvidia Display Driver, restart computer before installing this new Nvidia driver.

Edited to add this great tip by theppl:

 

Took mine back to Best Buy tonight and exchanged it for another one. Man, am I glad I did! The screen is 100000% better. Black levels actually look like they should. The fan whine is still there, but at such a low level as to be virtually non-existent.

Happy dance time for me!

 

YEA I KNEW IT! I swear my first one had a better screen XD

Does your box have a green dot on the label or a yellow one? Or neither? What'd you go in complaining about? The fan whine or the screen? Or something else?

 

Are those drivers for Home or Professional Edition?

I do not have a paid subscription for rapidshare so I have to wait for 12-14 min between each download. Is it possible if you put all the drivers in single zip file?

Thank you!

 

The quality of the glossy screen is Luck of the Draw, nothing to do with green or yellow dots or mini-refreshes. I had a terrible screen, the second F is only Bad. Mangosango and possibly Joe Bleau have good ones.

 

You're playing with fire.

For your clean install, after the OS: is installing Vaio_Care > inserting your recovery discs > installing wanted software (WinDVD, Roxio, etc) & Sony_drivers (or get fresh from support page) in the proper order (Step 3) > using Vaio_Update 5 to get the specific & most up-to-date certified F drivers for your F model & OS too complicated?

Are these updated new drivers (Nvidia & VAIO_Event Service) included in the Rapidshare links? Will they be updated when the next drivers & software updates published by Sony_support comes out?

 

I'd love to say that the whole problem is gone. Well, looks like it so far. I watched 7 1080p videos at once. And thats on 2 screens to say the least and it didn't crash once. Well, after about 2 minutes shockwave crashed and i got that sad face, BUT! the whole OS didn't lock up so hmm, its all good?

 

?

Not everyone has Recovery Discs, (e.g. me and still looking). I've used the above method in the past on the two SZs and the AW I owned and the Fn buttons never worked. Also it took a lot of time.

As mentioned these are tested and working drivers (by myself). New ones will added over time, I created the above thread <24 hrs ago, give me a change . The Nvidia driver is already in the list, the Event Service isn't yet. And that's a good example of why I create the drivers thread, Sony don't always list the updates under all models or regions. The Evenent Service update wasn't listed under the F series model I downloaded the drivers from.

 

Home, Professional or Ultimate, doesn't make a difference. They are for 64-bit though.

I've put all the divers in a pack before, problem is if a couple of drivers or utils are updated the whole pack has to be recreated and then re-downloaded by users looking for just the updates. The driver pack also took too much time to maintain, which I would have done had users who downloaded it replied with a simple thanks. e.g. in the current drivers thread, already have users downloading but the only reply is from someone complaining.

I'll make a deal, someone give me what I've already requested several times in this thread, a copy of Corel WinDVD and PMB or an ISO of the UK Recovery Disc and I'll make all the RS links free downloads for a the next 7 days.

 

Why can't you just link to Sony's direct links? and instead upload to RS and get RS points?
There are free hosting sites lite MediaFire.com
and not everyone has a RS premium account.

 

"I watched 7 1080p videos at once..." - that's nuts, I get dizzy just @ looking at your screen captures.

Did you do anything to fix your problem or it just went away?

Did you update Shockwave or look for a corresponding error in System Event?

Did you try with different browsers as suggested to see if the error is common to all?

 

Well here's my battery eater test result

First image at 1:16:30 (2nd try)
Second Image (Magenta screen) at 1:21:55 was actually my first try but at 600x800 rendering and forgot I had wifi, bluetooth, and a usb stick on.

how's everyone? I've been swamped at work! Couldn't do the recharge as I had to put this computer to work. And time-saving work it did!! Not a single hiccup running autocad, photoshop, and excel apps at once.


Working on a recharge now to do the same test again....

 

@ Mujja: Don't be offended, I understand your efforts to offer some links for F drivers, but think that it's better to get them from Sony_support as explained previously.

Maybe you missed my reply to your request? UK Recovery Discs Missing: PMB & WinDVD

 

I never changed anything. The problem just went away or the conditions weren't right. When it did crash, i wasn't always watching hd videos so my problem might not be exactly the same as but surely very similar. As with the browser, it last crashed on Google chrome and i tried doing the exact thing straight after it crashed the 3rd time and that was nearly a week or so ago. Hmmmmmm, i hope the problem fixed itself. I never updated flash but i do remember google chrome updating itself