Official Sony VAIO F Series Owners lounge *PART 2*

Err... I had a HDD FAT32 in a WD My Passport USB enclosure that I formatted to NTFS then pulled out the HDD & used it in the eSATA/USB two-in-one enclosure connected to the F via USB & then via eSATA/USB two-in-one port. All worked fine when benching with HD Tune Pro as I posted previously.

But I did format again when connected via eSATA/USB two-in-one port for good measure. I agree, formatting when connected via SATA is better (and much faster) than via USB.

My suggestions was in case the new HDD in the eSATA/USB two-in-one enclosure is not recognized via the eSATA/USB two-in-one port.

For example: my Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000 (Bluetooth) was not recognized by the F. I then installed it using the included Bluetooth dongle then turned off the mouse, removed the dongle & now the F recognized immediately the mouse. The dongle now lives in a drawer.

It was just a workaround tip.

 

I don't know much about SSD's but I thought that TRIM was cleaning up the garbage when the drive is idling? If so, then it should be normal that the LED is showing activity, no?

You could also have programs scanning the drive like an anti virus or a media program looking for content.

 

That's win 7 doing its stuff. My desktop does exactly the same thing.

 

Hey you know what, I plan to get an F because I want the screen size. I'm not a big guy but I don't see myself having a problem lugging it around the house. Battery life does worry me, I do plan to be wireless a lot, but it's not like you can't use it because of the weight. How bulky is this power block?

 

I have two other laptops (Toshiba and HP) running Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit and they don't exibit the same behavior so I guess it's a combination of Win 7 and hardware. No worries, I was just wondering if everyone else had the same behavior. I learned to ignor the constant blinking cause this laptop with an Intel SSD rocks

 

VGP-AC19V15: "Compatibility F_Series, Weight: 0.92 lbs" (0.42 kg), 15.5 cm x 6.7 cm x 3.7 cm (sorry for the people living in the last country on earth that's not metric yet. Maybe in Obama's second term?).

 

You can format just fine over USB. Most ridiculous thing I've heard all day, most USB drives aren't even meant to be removed from their case. (Not unless you buy a case and stick the drive in there, anyway)

 

Joe, Melodymaster,

it is a 2.5 inch notebook 640gb drive, brand new. I put it in the enclosure. It is not recognised in 'computer' whether I plug in via esata or USB, even with a dedicated 5v input. When I look in applications, disk manager, lower down it refers to disk 0 which I am sure is my 500gb C: drive but disc 1,2,3 etc say no media.

I guess I could try to put it in another enclosure as the enclosure itself could be faulty, or it truly does not support over 500gb.

I intend to use it for ripping/remuxing HD movies to play back on my WDTV media player which is why I was tempted by the larger capacity drive and to forgo the lower speed. Also I didn't want an ext HDD that needed its own mains power supply or one that didn't have the esata port .

 

I guess you haven't been dealing with computers as long as I have. SO many times I've had to deal with problmes on a client's computer or mine because a drive was formatted via a USB interface. Some chipsets are more problematic than others. And again, remember that a drive formatted as AHCI won't be recognized or causes bluecreens under ATA and vice-versa.

Format a drive, on native SATA, as IDE or AHCI as desired, THEN use it under the vagueries of a USB connection. You may indeed get a drive that works on the USB interface used for formatting, then when it's full of important stuff find that it can't be read OUTSIDE of that box.. It happens, .. Often... Sometimes it will get corrupted on the native interface as the system finds a need to "repair" the drive (formatted in a USB enclosure) once installed. I've lost 500 gigs of films that way, even GetDataBack didn't save the stuff.

 

Bypass the enclosure, format the drive directly on a motherboard SATA port, to confirm it works, THEN try it in the enclosure. In addition to what I said to OOTlink about formatting in an enclosure being a bad idea, it also of course bypasses a possible hardware issue with the box.

If you HAVE no other system with a SATA port, replace the boot drive in the F11 with the 640, and use an XP or Vista or Win7 install disc to format the drive. Or the F11's recovery discs has a formatting tool I believe. And there are third-party discs such as Ghost's that will format a drive to NTFS 5. (W2K is NTFS 4)

Incidentally a couple of other posters in this thread have also been unable to get their drive to be recognized in an enclosure, they have not come back with the results after I told them to install the drive on a native Sata port.

 

To be more precise, you cant format drive as ide or as ahci. There isnt any options and diffrences in standard format of the drive (lo level format is exception). AHCI and IDE are hardware controllers specification and what you can do with them, is enabling or disabling that options in bios. Setting AHCI enabled in bios, will result in a blue screen on system startup which is using IDE drivers.

AS to formatting and such on USB connected drives I agree, that anything like that should be performed on hdd connected directly to the mobo either by sata or ide.

 

Actually, I find that a drive formatted with AHCI drivers will NOT in fact be recognized in a system that is configured as IDE. Windows will say the drive is unformatted and ask to do a format. Also GetDataBack can be used to convert from IDE to AHCI and vice-versa. There is a difference in the format on the drive itself. (Maybe related to NCQ? I don't know..)

 

Thats quite strange, I have 4 hdd and 1 intel ssd, formated them in Win7 ahci enabled, and connected them to the winxp and win2003 IDE controllers machine without any problems. 2 of the drives are EIDE interface, and other 2 and ssd also are SATA300. I also didnt have any problems to instal new os (winXP and Win7) on them both with IDE and AHCI controllers, since I was doing a research about controllers, drive comparison and ssd in diffrent enviroments like chipsets P35, P45, 945 and old Abit NF7 with Duron 1800Mhz.

 

I'm not saying they couldn't be read in every case, but I've lost data by trying to read a drive on IDE formatted under AHCI drivers. And again I think that it may be having used the AHCI drive with NCQ, THEN installing it under IDE, caused the problems. I don't seem to have had compatability issues lately, maybe it happens only under XP, which DOESN'T have native AHCI support, unlike Vista. There is actually a difference in how various chipsets implement AHCI, Micron, Sis, Marvell, Intel.. I forget the others....which had to load their own boottime drivers. A drive formatted on a Micron I/O set errored out on a Sis chipset etc. (A reason why we want to avoid adding a USB interface chip to the mix) Incompatability may have been resolved now that Windows has native support for AHCI.

 

thnks alot mate

 

I used vaio updates one time since I received it, now am trying to check for updates n got this message ( cannot acquire the configuration settings for VAIO update)

is that normal or there is something wrong?
Thanks To all

 

This has been well-discussed, click on "Important Info" then back to Update.

 

Thanks for such a great response. I've tried most of your suggestions already(1, 2, 3, 4, 6) to no avail and don't feel to comfortable about opening it up to reset the cmos/bios just in case it voids the warranty in some way.

When I said the keyboard was working in Ubuntu(linux) it was, then it stopped working for the login prompt when booting into Ubuntu over half the time and now it seems to almost never be working in Ubuntu. Somewhere on the Sony support site it states that if the trackpad is not functional when booting with F10 pressed(I think its booting into the recovery partition but not 100% sure) then its hardware is malfunctioning.
And before I forget, this was not a clean install, it was the windows 7 install that came with the machine, Sony bloatware and all, the trackpad and keyboard stopped functioning all of a sudden on booting into windows 7 and since then have never worked. Device manager will state the tackpad is not present but the keyboard is detected and reports no problem even tho I can't use it.

Thanks again for your help, it is much appreciated. I will try the steps 7 and 8 before shipping my baby back to Sony, I don't want to ship it back and have been using it with an external keyboard and mouse now but seeing how it really seems to be a hardware issue and it's still under warrantee I kind of feel dumb not to return it for a repair.

 

Thank You so Much

 

Huge problem guys =(
I did the sony vaio update via vaio update I guess, its a program that comes with the computer, and now my highest resolution is 1280-1024.

What shoud I do?

Thanks.

@ Solved

 

can you tell us what got updated. theres a log in the vaio update program.

then could you give us some information about your system? right click on the desktop and go to personalization. then click on advanced settings.

tell us which adapter it is and find us the firmware version. at the very least, we'll need those to be able to help you.

 

It's solved anyway =)
THe vaio restarted and it was installing the nvidea drivers

 

Well yah, it goes to a lower, 4:3 default VESA resolution when the Nvidia drivers are unistalled, then after reboot the new drivers bring it back to full res.

 

Here are some possible leaks of the update (refresh to F12):

SONY VAIO F12Z CI7 1.6 8GB/500 BD-RW 16.4# W7HP BLACK - Din ultimata studio i Full HD
Sony VPCF12Z1E/BI Vaio laptop (VPCF12Z1EBI)

At first, doesn't seem there are significant upgrades.
GPU isn't specified, only says Nvidia.
So I guess that the gpu and the screen will be a bit updated.
Or the specs on the swedish site are incorrect.

Update:
I've searched some more on the web, found out on different sites they gave for the gpu: Nvidia N11P-GE1 1Gb
Which seems to be the codename for the 330M GT, which should mean no change in the gpu....

I hope all these webshops are wrong. Maybe they're aware and Sony doesn't want information to leak and they give false specs... or the refresh just fixes all the problems with the F11 (mic, fan,...).

 

I dunno...looks to me like Sony Vaio F12Z Core i7 1.6Ghz w/ 8GB RAM 500GB HDD, Blu-Ray writer, 16.4" full HD.

This sounds very familiar.

Bill

 

The Swedish site refers to the "old" F11 model and states that is discontinued and cannot be ordered. As for the F12 on the uk site, no info yet...

 

Maybe someone could start a speculative VPCF12 thread so we could keep this one focused on the_VPCF11?

 

It will be a new i7 at least, with lower TDP. There's no reason for those other specs to look any different on paper.

 

OK, re esata enclosure with 640gb hdd.

I opened up my other enclosure/notebook hdd that works, to try to swap the enclosure. On taking out the hdd I immediately realised that I probably hadn't slid the 640gb enough onto
the other one- tried it again and it was recognised.

It is currently being formatted. I didn't go for the quick format, now it seems to be taking forever !

Maybe a quick format would have been fine, the hdd itself being brand new.

 

IF you're formatting it through USB, it will only go half the speed of direct Sata.

 

Ya, sometimes we miss the obvious. Glad for you that it was a cockpit error & not hardware.

A new one for me just happened now: plugged a WD Passport via USB in the F & Win 7 tells me I need to format in order to be able to use that drive. No way I'm loosing my data! Tried the other ports & after plugging/unplugging a few times it finally mounts OK.

Removed that enclosure after working on some files & connected an other WD My Passport w/ 280 GB of data. This time: can't install driver for that unknown device. Change ports, plug/unplug cycle, Device Manager, Device & Printer > Install New Device, Disk Management (all to no avail) & finally try the enclosure on an other desktop PC w/ XP SP3: same cr@p! WD support kb says if same problems on different PC's then it's broken.

Then the big Eureka!: I have been using the same new mini USB/USB cable all the time, maybe? Everything now works fine with a different cable. A 45 minutes waste + the time it will take to Check Disk on both drive to see if there is some corrupted files caused by the defective cable. Next time my FIRST troubleshooting step will be to try with an other cable if the external enclosure is not recognized by the F.

Less than half.

 

Yes we are not metric. We are the old west, only with a bunch of pansy laws (cleaned that language up) and damn that power block is honkin'!
So would you say, speculatively, that you dont think the F is suitable to my needs. I must admit the looks did drive me to it, but I like the specs, a little futureproof, but I do worry about usability around the house. I hate having to plug in things all the time. Guaranteed, I will keep it unplugged most of the time I can do so. I mean, you can hit the screen off button to save battery life right? So as long as I'm not watching something I'm OK. And as far as watching stuff, a half hour of video shouldn't kill the battery as long as it's got a decent charge, correct?

PS that rhino beetle thing is sick. Why's it so shiny, almost translucent. That things cool!

 

I use the heavy duty battery, and really the F is good for a whole morning of use about the house before it has to be plugged in or the battery changed. Battery life is not THAT restrictive unless you are mobile all day, with no access to an outlet. It's nice to have such a powerful machine in hand when you want to quickly look something up then run Excel and photoshop to codify the research while sitting outside.

Yah, Costa Rica's insects are scary, almost as bad as the May bugs and Junebugs we get around here, west of Toronto. Cockchafer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I'm about to buy this configuration from Sony Style Canada (I was told that the new F series with HD display will be out in Canada in 6 weeks and I don't want to wait):

VPC-F1190
Intel® Core™ Quad i7-820QM processor (1.73GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 3.06GH
16.4" VAIO Display (1600x900) with NVIDIA® GeForce® 310M GPU (512MB VRAM)
256GB (256GBx1) Solid State Drive
Blu-ray Disc™ Read and Write Drive
Fresh Start™
Gray
Microsoft Windows® 7 Professional
8GB (4GBx2) DDR3-SDRAM-1333

Issues: no HD display currently available in Canada and the GPU is the 310M instead of the 330M.

I am NOT going to use this laptop for games or 3D applications, but exclusively for photo editing (with external calibrated monitor) and video editing, the applications that I'm going to use are Photoshop CS5, Lightroom and Premiere. I am NOT interested in watching Blue Ray movies on the laptop display.

1) Am I going to have a decrease in performance with the Photoshop/Lightroom/Premiere becasue of the 310M vs the 330M?
2) Occasionally I am going to review photos on the laptop display: beside the lower resolution, is the display quality (colors and viewing angles) different/inferior compared to the US 1920x1080 display?

thanks!

 

If you're going to use it as a desktop, I highly recommend going for an asus essentio i7 or just building something. Yikes!

 

It finished formatting, via esata as you suggested. Now I am transferring BD iso files to it.

 

isn't there any solution for this noise problem yet ?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/att...ial-sony-vaio-f-series-owners-lounge-memo.zip

 

Hey guys, I'm an A+ certified IT consultant with a degree from Caltech...

When formatting hard drives, I suggest you do a 10 way zero out and do it only on the internal SATA port. You will need a funny looking extension cable for this.

Also, it helps to be standing on your head.

*Normal people* I can assure you that the advice given in this thread for formatting externals is a monumental waste of time. There's more to this story than meets the eye - it could be the dude's using a defective enclosure, but if you go and purchase a sealed WD or seagate, there's no need to pull the HD out of the enclosure to format it, that's insanity.

If you couldn't get a reliable format from a drive inside a USB enclosure, they would've never sold.

 

Yes. Everytime you tweak an image or video, the video card + CPU renders the image so you can see the results. Check this recent post: VAIO_F Series Nvidia Driver 197.44 Update vs OEM Benchmarks & the links in the bottom.

Again: GT 330M besides having 1 GB memory vs. the GT 310M with only 500 MB is also faster w/ a memory bus twice the size. Going to Notebookcheck's Laptop Video Graphics Cards - Benchmark List > selecting 330M + 310M & applying "Restrict":

 

Yes: focus on your inner self, ear plugs, headphones, whistle a tune or buy an other brand.

 

Which is why you don't know what you're talking about. Paper is worthless, experience rules. I guess I should just discount what actually happens and pretend it was all a dream, and continue to screw up systems because " EXPERIENCE IS A FANTASY.."

And since you didn't get a degree in English, I guess that's why you didn't understand the language when it was stated that the problems with a drive formatted in the enclosure, which usually works fine in the enclosure, may THEN not work on direct ATA or Sata.

Please go ahead and stick to what they taught you in school, stay in the Box and don't look outside it; I'll continue to do what I know and actually FIX computers..

 

True story concerning formats, this goes back to around 2001. I was building a system for a customer using a non-Intel motherboard, VIA I believe. Had to put in a 30 gig drive.. We had one that had been used a couple of weeks in the office on an Intel system which subsequently had its boot drive replaced with a larger one. So the 30 Gig was tested, warranteed, fine using that in a new system. I formatted it on the Sis system on the workbench while assembling the VIA, transferrred it to the VIA set, it was recognized, I installed windows, (no quick-install image for this type of set) burned-in, system ran fine, delivered to client. Remember this ATA drive started on an Intel, reformatted on a Sis, installed on a VIA.

Customer brings back the system, bluescreens at boot.. I notice something odd about the starting sequence. Take out drive and put on Intel set. The original files and boot loader etc from the Intel office machine were still there, the Intel set booted with Intel chipset drivers and the Office W2K as if there had been no subsequent wipe, and no subsequent XP install. There was only half the capacity on the drive there should have been. Put the drive back on the Sis system, and there was the client's XP! In other words the drive supported two completely different formats, one for the Intel, one for the Sis. Why It had decided to switch from the client XP install back to booting with the older Win2K files I have not the vaguest clue. All the guys were standing around the system scratching their heads. One for the books.

From that point I have always formatted a drive on native Intel sets; however, many systems have come into the shop with bluescreening etc, that inevitably have been tracked down to the drive NOT being formated in the system it was destined for, or had used an enclosure. Never mind doing stuff on my own computers, with drives not being recognized across systems. I have over twenty-five hard drives going back to the 1990s with various video files and data. Many of those are still particular about which system they need to be connected to. One drive ONLY works on a cheap IDE-USB interface that plugs into the back of the drive, never connected natively or in any enclosure. I need to get the data off that one.

Oh. one other case, a drive was lent me to copy video files for editing, the drive had been taken out of a system, put in the enclosure. Recognized fine via USB2 on my P4. Copied the files, deleted the originals, gave the drive to the client. He said nothing was on it. I tried the drive on both systems, and it was indeed cleaned out, corrupted, no files, no format, nothing recoverable. Which meant the video had to be recopied from the DV tapes - a shame since the project was well under way with the files as originally indexed. Again the drive had failed after being written to and formatted across systems. Once reformatted natively the drive was fine - but empty.

Sure, sometimes standing on your head and chanting invocations is all you CAN do to get a system working. These are computers, recalcitrant mischievous semi-sentient beings created in Hell, not any sort of machinery that could actually be described as "logical."

Data is too valuable, irreplaceable, don't screw around, format the drives RIGHT, and save hassles.



So it goes..

 

After my performance testing the other day, I did some reading on how to increase my memory results WITHOUT OVERCLOCKING. At the same time, I had i7 Turbo 6.95 running. I noticed that C1E and EIST were checked as being turned on. I looked these up and found that both were Bios settings which allow W7 to manage the processor in order to reduce power consumption. I also found out that both of these instruction sets hamper performance. My laptop is always plugged in, so I have no power worries. I used the i7 Turbo 6.95 program to disable these instruction sets (and to also make sure that turbo mode is always enabled!) and my performance has risen VERY noticably!

With my newest entry, there are 210 laptops in the Performance Test 7.0 database which have the same Core i7 820 processor. My F11 is now rated #2! Also, here is a search for all database entries where the same processor and graphics card are used. My machine BLOWS ALL OTHERS AWAY! My current machine is the top listing, and this same machine, prior to the mods, is listed directly below it. The results from 5-20 were better than the others, but today's results are incredible.



You too can unlock the true fury that this machine is capable of! Heat has not been an issue yet and the Vaio fans are barely moving with my laptop cooler fans operating as normal.

Bill

 

My EIST is greyed out. How were you able to disable? Note: It appears the 720 does not have this function.

 

I recently downloaded RealTemp 3.40. Embedded in this program are a few other programs. One such program is called "i7 Turbo 6.95". When you run this program, there are some check boxes on the bottom. I simply unchecked them all.

If you are saying that you are IN this program and can not uncheck them, then I don't know. Perhaps it was my clean install of W7 Pro and my lack of most Sony bloatware. I use all Sony drivers and all Vaio needed programs, but I did not install all of the Vaio "help, maintenance and settings" type programs. I let Windows perform these tasks. As such, I do not have the Intel Turbo Boost driver, yet turbo works fine. I can not seem to get Nvidia drivers to work correctly, but the Sony drivers work very well. I do not seem to have all Vaio Care options that Joe has, but my computer is BLAZING fast when compared apples to apples against others with the same configuration. Even the memory speed is WAY up since chaning these settings.

I am very happy with the speed I now have, and when doing the Load test in RealTemp, I could get 1 core to 68C, but the others only got to 65-66C. This tells me that these changes did not affect core stress. It only affexts power use (and battery life would be my guess).

I wish I could better answer your question, but I do not run the factory OS. I immediately installed an SSD and installed W7 Pro on a single partition, so most Sony specific programs were left out unless absolutely needed.

Bill

 

Strange. Aren't these just different clockings of the same chip?

What I found really cool is that if you look at the database chart, all of the CPUs are shown at 1730Mhz (plus or minus a bit) and once I turned these settings off, mine jumped to 3060Mhz...the top turbo speed for my CPU. I also noticed that when showing turbo boost, it now gets that high, where before it would only get to 2967Mhz.

Bill

 

Anyone that didn't even crack a smile at the word cockchafer is messed up.

 

I am able to untick mine OK, 720 with clean install.

 

I should know better but here's my two cents. Typically when this happens, it's the partition and not the formatting that's the problem. Before a drive can be formatted, it has to be partitioned in some manner and that's usually where the trouble is. Remember in the old days when we had to low level format? That was even worse. Oh well this is so off subject, I'll stop.

 

Yah a new partition may have been created accidentally, but in hard disk management only one partition was ever shown. There may have been an error in the firmware etc. but nevertheless one chipset read one set of files, another chipset read the other.

It's on topic in that it's a lesson NEVER to reject any line of troubleshooting, just because it's "not in the book." Every trouble that arises with our laptops MUST have a cause, don't limit your avenues of investigation.