Official Sony VAIO F Series Owners lounge

My first post and maybe I can add some perspective to your decision and viewpoint. Just ordered the night before the ability to order on Sony's website went away. i7 720, SSD, premium screen, 6G memory, backlight, Windows Pro/ fresh start/ no Norton, standard batt (extended batt protrudes almost an inch), blue ray player only, black. USA. Delivery date 2/9.

General perspective: My purchase price and budget was approx $2000. i7,widescreen, numeric side keyboard, three yr hardware warranty are my must haves. What are the choices in the market? Dell Studio 17, Toshiba Qosmio, Alienware, HP Pavillion, Asus, Acer. I researched and researched and compared and compared. For me, I get more from Sony than any other. The weakest component on this laptop is the graphics card. If you want perfect, spend 4-5k and get the Dell M6400. Now start to understand, even at this price range, you have a make a few compromises.

Now for my question. I am used to a bright 17" screen. I have a HP Pavillion. When I compare side by side with the competition, the F does not seem as bright and vibrant. Again, do you guys feel confident with manual adjustments I will be happy with this screen? Thanks!

 

I agree. Look at this model at the Dutch site: https://www.sonystyle.nl/SonyStyle/VAIO-notebooks/VPC-Y-/VPCY11S1E/S.NL3 and note that it uses a Core2Duo series never seen before in the FW line: the SU series. The other two pre-configured models use: Core i3 !!!

No, this does NOT appear to be a mistake.

Somehow this feels like the way the bad NVIDIA cards exploded on the market and then imploded from their defects.

Interesting that at least two computer manufacturers are down-powering the notebook CPU offerings -- which seems to point to defects in the touted power management of the i7s, does it not? (Another forum member mentioned that Dell was abandoning the i7s in favor of i5s.)

Two manufacturers jumping the i7 ship in the models now going to manufacture. What are the chances that this is a coincidence?

Call Intel.

 

You posted a link to the Y series and the Y series never had a Core i7 processor to begin with. Sony only uses Core i7 in the F series afaik.

 

It was a 5400rpm 500gb that was incorrect

 

If you are looking at an F with a 1600x900 screen side-by-side with an HP, you are correct: the lower resolution F screen will likely be darker. Not the FullHD screen, however. So since you state you will be ordering the higher res screen, testimony on the site indicates that the work-arounds forum members have suggested will restore all brightness to the Sony screen -- a screen which generally has been known for color fidelity equivalent to that of most manufacturers RGB LEDs (according to, was it?, notebookcheck, I believe -- you can search for a posting by moderator Phil to that effect).

Good luck -- because you are in the middle of a possible disappearance of the i7 from the Sony market....

 

You're right -- with the site changes, the Y was in the position on the page that the F used to occupy. So, when you go to the F series page, it is now BLANK ( https://www.sonystyle.nl/SonyStyle/VAIO-notebooks/F-Serie-16-4/).

However, another forum member indicated that the CTOs at his or her location are now bringing up i5 processor info instead of i7.

Also, the Japanese Sony sites posted much earlier in this thread indicated i3, i5, and i7 with a choice of FullHD and Premium FullHD screens (the latter with the Adobe RGB compatibility): http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/vaio/products/F11/

Something is afoot -- and it still looks like it may be a downgrading of the i7 processor at least in certain models and countries, which could easily correspond to batch problems with suppliers.

 

Hello everyone. I'm new here, but I have pretty much read all of the posts in the thread, so I'm aware of all of the pros and cons of the Sony Vaio F Series. I purchased my CTO F Series on Jan. 16th, and it shipped on the 20th. I'm a little worried about what's going on with the halt in sales because the last news that I got regarding the location of my package was early in the morning on the 21st, so it's been about 2 1/2 days now that it's been in transit without any scans along the way at certain FedEx locations.

If the F Series was halted because of a technical problem, is it possible that my shipment was halted and sent back to Sony to be fixed? I haven't received any emails from Sony regarding this, so it's probably still on its way here. I live in Pennsylvania, so the distance from San Diego is quite large, so it might just be in transit still.

I'm hoping that the halt in sales is due to a lack of supply and not because of a technical issue. Also, if I do get mine today, I'll make sure to post if I notice any problems, and I'll also provide pictures because mine is the Grey version, and I believe some people were looking for more pictures of it in that color.

I also got the premium screen on mine, so I'll take pictures with the computer on and off. I'll also try to get pictures of it in areas with a lot of sunlight as well as no sunlight. If there's anything else that anyone wants to see, let me know.

EDIT: Okay, I called FexEx, and the automated system told me that it was being delivered to the local fedex place today. I then called a representative, and they said it wouldn't be here until Tuesday, and they were sorry for the false date. I'm not sure what that's all about.

 

@SaxySteve29: When I ordered my FW last year, it took 5 business day to be delivered to Newark, DE. So you might only see it on Monday.

See
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5763515&postcount=998
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5763817&postcount=1002

 

Agreed. Anyway the two CPUs are fundamentally different architectures, the Core2Duo is supported by a Northbridge chip which handles memory and I/O, a complete processor on its own; the i7 is modeled after the AMD chips which DIRECTLY address memory and I/O and don't require a Northbridge at all. This is one thing that supposedly means the i7 is more power-efficient for its calculating speed. The physical layout of the mainboard would be quite different, DDR memory requirements are different, power management is different... And the i7 architecture is actually cheaper to source because of the lack of necessity of this whole Northbridge layer. That's why the newest 17 systems seem so cheap to begin with.


I can see Sony North American regretting that they didn't offer i5 or i3 as the primary CPUS for this series, but I highly doubt they're going back to the original C2Ds.

Oh by the way, even though I had the F1190 in my hands (but it's back at Sony now) to date there is neither a hold nor debit on my card, they haven't charged for it yet. Just a boo-boo.

 

Is it possible they implemented the i7 wrong thereby creating driver conflicts?

 

Why would one be surprised if the F is offered w core 2, i3, i5? Going to Sony support for the F (select Option 3 > VPCF), this is only one quarter of the models from the drop-down menu (got fed-up with copy/pasting): "VPCF110FL, VPCF110FLBI, VPCF111FB, VPCF111FBB, VPCF111FD, VPCF111FDB, VPCF111FX, VPCF111FXB, VPCF111FXH, VPCF112FX, VPCF112FXB, VPCF112FXH. VPCF112HB, VPCF112HBBI, VPCF113FD, VPCF113FDB, VPCF113FX... etc, etc.

So maybe they are temporary out of i7? After all this is one of the reasons why many of us want one... and all the other manufacturers have some new models with the i7 in the pipeline to be launch soon.

Unless someone can post a proof or quote from an authoritative source, it's all speculations.

 

Seems to me that the only really reliable, well-supported brand is Lenovo.

*hugs his T61*

That said, if the Vaio F issues are ever worked out, I will be the first in line to get one, assuming the technology field hasn't moved on by then. If it takes several months to fix the buzzing issue, that is likely to happen.

 

I just don't know what to do now...I like the i7 F series but don't want to be stuck with a machine that Sony will ignore (and not issue fixes) if they are revising the hardware now. I still have 7 days until I can't return the laptop to Best Buy for a refund or exchange.

 

The i5 model of the F have has been on sale in Europe since the F was announced and the i3 was added approx. one week ago. This is consistent with i7 because its the same processor architecture so a lot of components can be shared. C2D is unlikely.

And it is very likely there is a shortage of some of the parts for manufacturing these laptops. It would have been nice though for Sony to state something about this on their website.

 

This is nuts. Sony has an excellent corporate image, why on earth would they ruin that?

 

For the rest of us - the people just getting ready to purchase - this little intermezzo by Sony can almost only be an advantage. Things are being checked out (probably), components may be changed, prices will almost certainly stay the same or be lowered, considering the competition.

Personally, being from a country (Denmark) where configure-to-order doesn't seem to be an option, I'd love for them to change the i7 to an i5 in the top model (and maybe lowering the price just a bit). As I've said before, I'd much rather have a cool and quiet machine than raw crunching power. (The i5 also does without a northbridge, right...?)


P.S. We're still sorely lacking in DPC latency documentation. This has been requested by (at least) one person besides me - and it's so easy, DPC Latency Checker is just a small exe that immediately shows the machine's state! Please

 

Ding, ding, ding...we have a winner !

What I see is that somebody makes a speculative statement, several others take up the chorus and before the day is out, it becomes established fact !

Now to add my speculation to the mix....

I believe the project manager in charge of the F-series launch, determined that it may be worthwhile to hold the laptops already in their possession, with them (instead of sending more of them out to the customers to fuel more - potentially baseless - speculation about the product and have a negative PR connotation get linked to the product), while the technical team comes out with a firmware patch for the (relatively minor) issues, apply the patch onto the products, and then ship it out to the customers.

The laptops already in the possession of the customers will in turn have a downloadable firmware patch, available from the Sony support site.

Now, developing a firmware patch also means that it will in turn have to be thoroughly tested out, before being released to the public, which means a delay of a couple of days to a week, depending on what needs to be developed/tested.

I doubt claims that the F-series will no longer get the Quad-core i7 chips have any factual basis and is just a product of speculation begeting more speculation. The i7 chips have been in the field, in live laptops, for several months now. Bottomline, let us stop the needless and baseless panic-mongering, till we know clearly what is happening.

 

Of course, these are speculations -- that's the fun of a forum. The corresponding utility of a forum is the sharing of actual experiences with the technology in hand.

 

Basically, what's happened is that someone in the factory accidentally leant on the f series kill switch (See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7054587/The-myth-of-the-Sony-kill-switch.html) and detonated all the new laptops. So they're having to make them all again.

Honest.

 

Okay -- now that I've verified that the configure-to-own, owner-made Sony Japan site has all of the i-series Intel processors in use (two i5s, and i3s, too)
http://translate.google.com/transla...e_include/html/F11/spec_vom1.html&sl=ja&tl=en
I'm going to hazard the guess, the speculation, that we are seeing supplier issues in the mix.

However, it is not to be discounted that some Sony reps have told members of this forum that there are technical issues with screens, etc. recognized by Sony and involved in delays.

The two are NOT incompatible, of course. And if one version of a processor has multiple bad batches, it could be that it becomes unavailable in certain parts of the world but not in others, depending on assembly site, etc.

 

I'm suspecting (speculation) 95% of the world is unaware of any of this. They seldom if ever go to the Sony site. Most won't buy something like a laptop online but instead go to Best Buy and WalMart, like what they see and feel, and buy it. Oh and they never come to this forum.

 

Can you provide a link to the corresponding post? I have only seen a member mentioning that Sony told him there were problems with the web site.

 

The thought of 330 million people aware of Sony's ineptitude with the F series and website would be enough to scare the hell out of any Sony CEO!



#pedantic

 

I called Sonystyle sales in the US today and asked the woman point blank why the F Series is on hold on the site. She said it was simple supply and demand. They're waiting for another shipment of i7 processors. She said they weren't expecting the existing ones in stock to sell as quickly as they did. I asked her "so there are no actual issues with the i7 that caused this?" and she said "nothing we're aware of. The F series on the website is just on hold until we get another order of processors."

Hopefully that puts peoples minds at ease.

If it were the i7's which had a technical issue then we'd also likely see the other companies holding back. Dell is still allowing a configuration with an i7.

Also someone posted several pages back about Dell pulling i7's from their lineup, but the linked article talks about an issue with Dell Studio 17's only. If you go to Dell's site you can see that you'll still be able to order say, a Studio XPS 16 or a Studio 15 with an i7, so it looks like it was only the Studio 17s with the issue.

 

UPDATE.... Actually, I just called technical support.

After much prodding, and waiting, the man said the reason why they are no longer selling this product is due to the buzzing noise, until that issue is resolved. (I assume they don't like the returns and bad press being generated by those complaining on this forum.)

At first, he actually tried to tell me it was probably that they were just out of stock, but I asked him to kindly check for me, and told him that I had heard it might actually be due to buzzing noise issues with this model.

He came back and admitted to the buzzing.

He said that Sony engineers were trying to figure out and fix the buzzing issue, and that my options were to send it back for repair, or return the unit altogether.

Frankly, I'm not that bothered by the noise... I don't think its really worth a return of an otherwise great laptop, I don't know why its generated such a stir on this forum... I just worry that if there are other issues that they aren't telling us about...

 

Let's remember that there are power management issues with the i5 that will be resolved with the next revision, that's why I settled for the i7, which has been on the market longer and is in its second revision. However it is a fact that with a more agressive turbo mode the i5 can actually outperform the i7 in applications such as games that don't require heavy caching.

 

Too funny. The image conjured is priceless.

 

This is close to what I think is happening. The Sony technical experts are figuring out a fix for the buzzing as we speak and are holding the laptops until that fix is in place, before sending them out (instead of needlessly providing more fuel for baseless speculation).

I don't see a single issue reported till date, about the new-F, that merits this kind of a wholesale panic driven stampede and compulsive hand-wringing. Maybe I am not in on the joke, yet and that happens at times.

Of course I am not talking about an occasional defect but overall, other than the minor buzzing issue (temporary workaround already available for it), the laptop itself is fundamentally sound. The processing power in the i7-820M is something that I have personally experienced and all I can say is...wow ! About the CPU throttling down when in battery mode, I suspect that will remain as a "feature" and you simply have to be plugged in for those heavy duty tasks.....or maybe downgrade to an i3 or i5 based processor, as and when that becomes available as an option.

 

So they told you it was due to the buzzing? On the same day they told me it was due to the i7 being out of stock, and the other day they told me it was an issue with the website. I wish they would pick a story and stick to it because they aren't doing much for their image in my eyes.

Mine should be here on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to finally getting to use it.

 

I don't think ANYONE here has posted any issue about the use of the i7 itself. The laptop doesn't run too hot, as with some other brands with i7's, and the fan even at maximum processing usage is not objectionable.

And as I mentioned, my 1190 was an early serial (#00000021) and had NO buzzing or whining, however it was used, so I suspect it's an issue that was introduced after the well-tested prototypes but maybe during any small production-line changes.

 

I really couldn't agree more. I have no plans to return my unit. Unless someone can substantiate a claim that there is actually something wrong with this laptop.

 

The guys at the sales end are much more likely to think it's a supply problem, and the online guys a website problem; one would have to have inside knowledge to know about the buzzing, so I see no intentional inconsistency in what's being said.

 

Problems with the i5? tell me more, i havent heard about this before. A i5-processor would be my choice for now.

Grtz Jan

 

Also, can someone comment on the amount of heat (= fan noise) created by an i5 compared to an i7? Like, substantiated...

 

Give me a break dude -- I'm 57, have a F11 5 days old and I can surely hear the high pitched buzzing noise emanating from the upper right-hand corner of the unit Of course, I've been an audio engineer for most of my adult life!:laugh:

 

Just got my f11 yesterday, here are the specs of what I ordered:
Product: F2NBSP10-LBOM
Component: None
Component: No Fresh Start™
Component: Black
Component: Microsoft® Works
Component: Microsoft Windows® 7 Home Premium
Component: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR3-SDRAM-1333
Component: None
Component: Intel® Core™ Quad i7-720QM processor (1.60GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 2.80GH
Component: 16.4" VAIO Premium Display (1920x1080) with NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 330M GPU (1GB VRAM)
Component: No Engraving
Component: Keyboard Backlight
Component: Standard Capacity Battery
Component: Norton Internet Security™ 2009 (30 Day Trial)
Component: 128GB (64GBx2) Solid State Drive with RAID technology
Component: DVD +/- R DL / DVD +/- RW / DVD-RAM Drive

I don't have the time to post any pics but I can tell you it is a pain installing Ubuntu on it as the Nvidia drivers(and the nv driver not from nvidia) will not detect the laptops display leaving me with an external monitor na d a black laptop screen, also the wifi card was not automatically detected but loaded just fine manually.

The big surprise was that the hard drive was NOT 2x64GB ssd in raid-0. Instead it is one Hitachi 128GB ssd drive. The performance is still very good giving me seq. reads and wites of about 170MBps with 512k blocks(these numbers arn't exact as I am not in front of the results right now) if I am not mistaken. But, even if it is fast it is not 2 64GB drives in raid, kind of a disappointment. Also the screen is definitly not very amazing out of the box and I doubt configuring it will make it much better as viewing angles, glare and backlight bleed through affect it quite a bit. This is not a deal breaker for me as in my opinion I have yet to see a great LCD monitor.

Keyboard feels really nice, I thought changing keyboard would take a lot of getting used to but already I feel fine with it. The backlighting works reletivly well also.

Windows performance index was a very nice 6.4, the 6.4 being the Aero and graphics benchmarks, the hard drive and prcessor are at 6.9

And I do have the whinning noise and unfortunatly it is there in Ubuntu as well as windows...

Had to type this fast as I really want to get the monitor issue in ubuntu with the Nvidia driver sorted out, as soon as I do I will post pics and fuill results of the benchmarks.

All in all I am very happy with this laptop.

 

Has anyone ever seen a mod of this notebook to make it run with 1 SSD and 1 HDD? Is this even possible?

 

I wonder if Sony reads through this forum.
If they are, and if they are really fixing issues with the F, hopefully they can bring over (to North America) the supposed? Different "premium" screens that are in Europe

At the very least, outfit the F with the FW screen which was amazing! The FW590 I had came with GREAT viewing angles, no backlight bleed, even brightness!!

The F I received had backlight bleed which led to uneven colors, one viewing angle at best, and a dimmer screen overall. (which in my previous posts I thought something did not look right with out of the box settings.) with some manual tweaking, things started to look better but nowhere near the FW quality.

 

What? Tell us more please?

 

two really bad news in a row!

 

Same here...I don't plan on returning my unit. The noise issue doesn't bother me. I am sure there will be a fix for it sooner or later.

 

The UK site for the S-Series CTO also says Core2Duo, but the options are all i3 i5 or i7... So I think we can (possibly) safely assume that they are using some old default template to link to CTO pages...

 

You would have thought that Sony could employ someone to keep their website at least factually correct. Even I could probably do that. (Sony, if you're reading this...)

 

I'm getting the same buzzing everyone has been complaining about. My fan also will make a whistling noise everyone once and awhile. They are not too bad but would be nice if they could be fixed.

I have owned 2 Sony Vaio F Series in the last 2 weeks and both have been giving me the same minor issues.

 

When does sony charge your card, when it ships? I ordered mine a few days ago and nothing.

 

Sony charges your credit card when the machine ships.

 

You saw the simple buzzing (or whining) fix, right?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5748529#post5748529

About the fan noise on/off, that's subjective unless somebody can measure the dB(A) emissions like notebookcheck does in their reviews so we could compare the data with other i7 laptops. After all it's a 45W quad core in a small form factor so it needs some cooling.

For example, check their Review Acer Aspire 8940G Notebook Core i7 under the Emission chapter with a graph (3/4 p down): " The Aspire 8940G can't really be called a pus*syfooter. The notebook is audible with 35.2 to 37.3 dB(A) in idle mode, but still acceptable. The fan turns up to a very audible 38.3 up to an agitatingly loud 45.4 dB(A) under load. The hard disk is almost drowned with 35.3 dB(A), the BluRay drive presents itself as less quiet with about 39.0 dB(A) at DVD rendering. Generally, we would say that the soundscape is just still acceptable".

One poster mentioned that he is a sound engineer, maybe he can measure the noise in dB(A)?

So "all" your problems boils down to 2, including one that's easy to fix?