Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *Part 3*

I'm guessing the opposite.

 

Q: I wonder if the F12...

A: I'm guessing...

 

Joe,

I did not uninstall any drivers this time. I simply followed the instructions from the page I linked to. I simply went to the page that was linked and hit "download" then "run". Everything went perfectly. Performance Test 7.0 graphics score was up about 2% on both 2D and 3D when comparing base systems "apples to apples" with no overclocking or any other changes.

Bill

 

UPON FURTHER REVIEW:

I am having the same problems I was having with the other updates. Typing is sporadic and there is now an instability. I just now restored my computer to the latest Sony drivers andnixed the Beta version from Nvidia.

Bummer.

Bill

 

You're the only person to have ever reported keyboard problems after installing a video driver. As I said when you first joined here, you have an issue with hardware or some unique dll somewhere. You should try working with another i7 / GT330 system to see if you have the same errors.

 

It is sort of a "morse code" type problem. The last icon I click will be blinking. When it blinks, everything locks up, then releases...locks up and releases...over and over. My SSD speed drops by 70%. If I click on the start menu, it disappears before I can move the mouse to click on something.

Everything just becomes unstable. It happened with the earlier driver upgrades and it did it again with this one. I rolled back the driver and again, all is well.

I am not a programmer. I have no idea why it does it, but I know that I don't need the driver enough to put up with this problem.

By the way, after rolling back the driver, my base benchmark hit a new high of 1986 with all background programs and security running. Tthis is with no overclocking of the video card. I hit a new high with my disk drive, with memory and with CPU.

I am quite sure that OCing the GPU would have put me close to 2100. This tells me that my machine has NO problems in any areas as long as I stick with the Sony drivers. Perhaps I am completely wrong, but the benchmarks are top notch and my machine sure seems to scream along.

Bill

 

not painting a sexy picture here. Sort of saying, yeah, you pay $1300, and you get the bottom of the barrel. If I spent $1300 building a computer, it'd be better than most peoples.

 

I spent $1581 on my F, then added a large 256GB SSD for another $579...$2,160 in total. This is twice the price of any computer I have ever bought and much higher than the price I would have paid for a desktop PC, which is all I ever owned and all I ever planned on owning.

This is the first laptop I have ever tried where I liked the keyboard. The backlit keyboard is fantastic. MY full HD display is stunningly good...better than my existing high dollar Dell Ultrasharp desktop monitor. Although I use the F11 as a desktop replacement, it IS portable.

My machine is turning in very high benchmarks...so high in fact that I am VERY pleasantly surprised. I do not miss a desktop. In fact, I had also purchased a new desktop for my wife's office at our church...a new Dell XPS Studio 9000 with a Core i7 and 12GB of DDR3 triple channel memory. I put the same SSD in her machine. I actually feel that the F11 is more responsive in day to day use, even though it is slower at heavy computations.

My machine is one of several F11s that I have now worked with. I had planned on an Asus G73, but this machine won me over and I ended up buying one for myself. A friend of mine has a top notch XPS, and I like this much better. the XPS cost about 20% more.

My benchmarks put me at the top of the heap for machines with the Core i7 820QM processor. There are a few that are faster, but all are overclocked CPUs and faster, more expensive GPUs.

I know others have had problems with a squeaky space bar, with poor displays or other possible defects. I have had none. This machine has been a delight for the 4 weeks I have owned it. If it has no failures, I will be extremely pleased with this purchase as it has far exceeded my expectations.

They say that you get what you pay for. I paid much more than I thought I would spend, and I am still very satisfied and even quite shocked at the incredible speed and smoothness of this machine.

Of course, part of this may be due to the SSD, but still...

Bill

 

If you grab a bunch of parts and a tower case, $1300 is definitely enough - especially if you got lucky and grabbed that $300 i7 + asus p6 combo at frys when it was out...

Add in a windows license, keyboard, mouse, and monitor? There's no way you'd get anything 'cept perhaps a very cheaply built i5 machine.

Very cheaply.

I'm telling you, in terms of i7 720qm laptops you can do far worse, what happened though is that the Vaio F is the "ULTIMATE BEST BUY MACHINE!"

This is bad because our standards are higher on all fronts. Sony is usually a first alternative to Apple or Lenovo, not an also ran with Dell and Acer or whatever crap.

 

Looking @ the > Specifications > Power on the Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drives product page, the data is the same for the 250 & 500GB:

While I saw some hybrid ST95005620AS 500GB selling for $137 shipped in the US while the conventional ST9500421AS - Product Page also 500 GB 7200 sells for about $85-100 shipped. I have 2 of those, they work fine.

For both drives, core performance is the same:

But the hybrid has twice the cache: 32MB + the 4GB SLC NAND solid state memory so that seems like a good return for $37 extra. Check their benchmark paper here: http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/sales/momentus-xt-benchmark-results.pdf

 

I purchased mine with the 500 gig 5400 rpm drive. It was fast. Then I put in an Intel SSD G2 160 gig and the performance increase was noticable to the senses without out even using benchmark tools. My boot time is: from the time I press the power on button to usability (including login) is 29 sec. Now that's pretty quick. So an SSD (good one at least) will improve the performance significantly IMO....

 

The Z have matte screen in US, so SONY should be able to offer matte screen on all of their machine if they choose to, its a matter of demand. I'm not sure if the demand of matte screen for F series in the states is high enough. I would definitely paid extra for that.

 

If we don't use the same measuring stick then how can we compare measurements?

What is the Boot Time reported in Vaio_Care > One Click Report?

 

How's this?

 

Looks awesome...better than mine!

 

That's fast.

Now the other question: I have 3 times your storage capacity & paid $85 for my HDD. How much was your Intel SSD G2 160 gig?

 

What is the problem with sony, what's its problem with the new technology? why still a middle class old architecture card on the F12? I love the look and design of the F11, but I have to wave goodbye for the gt330m.
I will glad to pay more $$$ if they have the option of the new fermi chip or at least ATI MR 5830/5730, but they just have problems with these awsome configurations, I don't understand

 

Rumour: Nvidia Fermi for laptops available July | bit-tech.net

 

The F11M1E with original HDD and without most of sony's bloathware.
It's pretty slow.

 

Wow >1 minute boot times?! ....

Do you guys like to mount your computers in paint mixers when you start them up or something? XD

 

yeah I know but I heard it's gonna be on the coming clevo and asus, not sure on sony.

 

Clevo laptops are usually >2" thick monsters...

I went and timed my F's boot time, it took ~40 seconds to get to the login screen and about 10 more after that to load the desktop (I did use a stopwatch, but the results weren't scientific IMHO).

I know about the vaio care thing, but either it's inaccurate or waiting for you to login or something, sounds quite.. off. That, or you guys are having issues. (BTW ,I did it with my machine unplugged, which does yield a slower boot time )

My current boot process involves Chameleon stopping and waiting for me to choose what partition I'd like to boot (this counted for about a second in my boot time + about 3 more to load the boot loader), soo... yea..

Going to do a factory reinstall this week... maybe. The hackintoshing business was a big fat wash as nobody can get the LCD to be properly recognized (a long time issue with Sony laptops).

 

Exactly, my point with that link is that the Fermi is barely crawling into some of the largest notebooks, and it is a firebreathing dragon. I don't see the fermi as being on the F12, because it just is not suitable for the form factor and its current efficient cooling system. I had always heard it WOULD be on the F12, so that's a change. The mobile GT4x0 is in fact a declocked desktop GPU, not an optimal design at all.

 

So I did some research and I found some what I believe are preliminary specifications on three different models of the F12. Now, to me this is just speculation and is a bit different than the other specifications found. Nothing really has changed?

There was some discussion about it here: Click Me. (pre-translated via Google)

VPC-F12M1E 16.4 Zilver - 1.099,00

VPC-F12S1E 16.4 Antraciet - 1.499,00

VPC-F12Z1E 16.4 Mat Zwart - 1.699,00

Upon further research, I came across this ( from here). This site seems more correct than the one above since it says it's the 740qm and not the 720qm. Looks like it is still the GT 330m.

 

Yup. Again, I paid $579 for my 256GB SSD. If my math is correct, that means I paid $494 more for 244GB less.

On the other hand, I save an average of 48 seconds each time it boots...and that only includes startup. If I added the much faster shutdown, it would be WELL over a minute. Time is money. If this is true, and I decide that my time is worth $36/ hour, then each second lost is worth one cent. At that rate, it means that I need to save 13 hours 43 minutes and 20 seconds of time to make up the difference in money.

The loss of storage capacity does not bother me because I will never fill this SSD. The computer I replaced was 9 years old and barely had 100GB of storage used. Right now I have all old files and all wanted programs on the SSD and I still have 175GB free space.

Getting back to the time saved by the faster SSD. If you boot once per day, you will save that time in about 2 years. However, this assumes that all of your time savings is simply during shut down and boot times. This is not true. In fact, everything you do will be much faster. Each time you start or close a program it happens twice as fast (or more!). Opening and closing large files is also much faster. In fact, while I can't give exact numbers because I have not been tracking this and I don't really feel the need to begin tracking, my guess would be that I will save the 13+ hours of time in just 3 or 4 months!

I am amazed at how quickly I can load a 400+ page PDF document or a 50+ MB scanned photo. While much of this added speed is due to the new, faster computer, the rest is due to an SSD that reads files larger than 256MB at about 230MB/sec and reads smaller files 10X faster than a mechanical drive can simply find them on the platter.

Joe, you are the one who originally brought up benchmarks. You are the one who always shows your results and tells everyone that it is not a true comparison unless each machine is "apples to apples". When you get bested, you then make up excuses or you bring up the cost, so that you end up with a better purchase value. If I had to guess, I would think that you have never had a fast SSD.

I can tell you that I have now worked with over a dozen machines with SSDs installed. All of the hard drives that I install in the machines I take care of will be SSDs from now on. They are a huge difference maker. Yes. I paid more than your HDD. I also know that when the Church Council walks into the room and the laptops get turned on, we are ready to go in seconds, not minutes. Everything is quicker because we are not waiting for a slow hard drive to bring up a large power point or video. Again, time is money.

As far as I am concerned, SSDs are worth the money.

Bill

 

Sow there's where the i3 comes short...

 

I'm not so sure...
You have 15 applications that start at windows boot.
What do you have for harddisk?

 

You convinced me!
I canceled my order for the 250GB and will order the 500GB.
Unfortunately nobody has them in stock.
It can be up to 3 weeks before I receive one.

 

I paid 450. I have approx 2 TB of storage (I use the power over eSata for more storage plus I have 1 TB usb external). Buy the time I need more internal storage, the SSD's will be larger and cheaper. "Rotating Rust" is on it's way out IMHO and yes I realize that's been said by other technologies that are still around. Bottom line, I have the need for speed

 

Fermi part it's not gonna happen.

Myself, I just hope they can trim enough heat with the 32nm CPU to make room for a 360M.

 

Haha yeah the GF100 core is a BEAST of a thing. The GTX 480 doesnt even come with the full memory bandwidth - its gimped down. I highly doubt notebook chips will be coming from the gf100 core. Nvidia will probably develop a lesser gf core that will be less power-hungry for notebook applications.

EDIT: Also got my power over esata drive working, so hopefully I'll be able to do more FRAPS-ing with a smaller performance hit

 

Hey Will! I've heard some information about the relatively short lifespan of SSD's in terms of read/write cycles. It's the only real thing that's preventing me from getting a smaller-ish (160gb or so) drive for my desktop/F11 is the fear that I won't be able to write to it after a while. Have you come across this issue yet?

Muchas gracias -

 

I guess nobody read my post on page 13.

On another note...where is the area to unscrew to replace the current hard drive that's in there?

 

I did just didn't reply to it. Sounds like the F12 will be an F11 with the issues worked out then.

 

I'm not Will but I'll respond. Your laptop will be obsolete by the time the SSD's writes fail. One conservative estimate is 10 yrs for normal to heavy use. I wouldn't worry. There's alot out there about the life cycle just do a search.

 

Mango,

I can't agree completely with JJ. I have been using SSDs now for about 3-1/2 months. So far, I can say that we have had no problems and have seen no decrease in speed. I will agree with JJ that, according to manufacturers, these should last for a long time. Apparently, SSDs have been used in military applications for quite a while, so I hope that they last.

I have the same concerns that you do. Therefore, I sacrificed a bit of speed for drives with a 5 year Crucial warranty. The M225 models we use are older Indillinx Barefoot controllers. They are not the current "state of the art" controllers, but the warranty and daily server backups put my mind at ease.

I have a complete backup of my personal computer. I learned this the hard way several years back when my wife lost everything TWICE in about 3 months because she would not spend the time or effort to back up. She had an original HDD fail. A few months later, her replacement HDD failed.

Try living with a woman who failed to heed your advice TWICE and had failures!!

Anyways, I have seen many platter HDDs fail also, so I backup and don't worry too much about it. Right now, the same 256GB SSD that I bought is down to $544 at Newegg. I had to install it first in a desktop and flash the firmware to the newest version because Newegg was selling 5 month old versions. After that, I installed this blazing fast drive into the F11 and have had no problems.

Newegg.com - Crucial CT256M225 2.5" 256GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

EDIT:

Perhaps I should explain a little more...

Older firmware versions, like the one that came on my SSD, didn't support TRIM. They also handled files a bit differently and files were fairly easily corrupted, leading to failure. I am hoping that this does not happen with the newest firmware. So far, so good! Perhaps a different SSD will not have these problems, but there have been no failures so far and no speed degradation either. If nothing else, the Intel SSDs like JJ has are supposed to be fantastic. Perhaps I put too much faith in Crucial, but I have never had a problem with their memory, and it is all I have used for well over a decade.

Now I sound like a spokesman. I am not!

Bill

 

Are we married to the same woman! My wife is a third grade teacher, you'd think she would have learned by now. Sorry, off topic, but I just had to respond.

 

OMG, please no gt330m again, I m really interested in the coming F12, but please stuck at least a 5650 in there...

 

Does the Vaio F series have Expresscard 2.0 or 1.0?

 

320 GB Serieel ATA (5400 rpm)

 

And you are faster then my i5

 

It is only the first boottime that is slow, your average boottime is fast for your harddrive.
Attached are the values for my i5 with the same harddrive.

There are a few things you can do.
First there are updates for your Vaio see the tab Updates.
You can run maintenance (Onderhoud).
You can look into the 15 applications that autostart on boot and see if you all need them.
I have 6 applications that autostart, see my screenshot of ccleaner and maybe I don't need them all.
But be careful not to disable antivirus and drivers.
If you don't know what they are for ask first.
You don't want to ruin a perfectly good setup.

 

I'm just wondering, Do you have space for an extra Hard drive in your F11s? Thinking of buying one but kind of against the 5400rpm

 

There is only a space for one single internal hard drive. That being said, you can modify your optical drive bay to accept a hard drive or you could use an exterior enclusure wired either via USB, firewire or eSATA (including "Power Over eSATA".

Bill

 

You could always superglue a 2.5" Power over eSATA external hard drive to the laptop's lid and have it constantly plugged in.

Also, where is the area to unscrew to replace the current hard drive that's in there?

 

Bottom, under the yellow sticker. Two exterior screws and 2 internal screws...3 minutes at the most to swap out a hard drive.

Bill

 

Talk about a timely article. I just found this. Read the conclusions and you will read EXACTLY how I feel about SSDs.

ASUS U30Jc Revisited: Adding an SSD - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Anand must be reading our minds as this was published an hour or so ago!

Bill

 

A bit easier on the laptop battery. Try:

http://www.youtube.com/html5

 

There's an SSD+optical drive that's just about to hit the market too, lol.