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

There's been a lot of discussion about clean installs and benchmark results ( safe vs. normal modes) and I would like to repost a website which details Win7 Services and what is safe and not safe to disable. This website appears a little shady, he has a page about his cats, but his information is quite legit. This guy has been around a long time and credible sources use his info. One can learn a lot about Window services. While this was more important to me before, running XP on slower systems, disabling features within 'Services' can be a performance booster. The website is just an all around interesting read.

http://www.blackviper.com/Windows_7/servicecfg.htm

http://wiki.blackviper.com/wiki/Category:Windows_7_Services

 

This is a perfect system for photoshop. Plenty of power with a 1080 screen.

 

Hy, I'm back from my holiday with a problem. Until now I haven't watched any blue ray movies on my F11 so I decided it was time to try one. Unfortunantly when I try to watch the movie after it plays all the trailer clips win dvd crashes and gives me a runtime error. It is really annoying. Does anybody know the solution. I tried to update the firmwire but I can't do it. I have a MATA BD-CMB UJ141AS with Firmware Revision 1.00.

 

Yes, exactly, I changed the block size and got similar results as my ATTO test.

 

This is not real life, but a very good example if you are a heavy multitasker.

It is a whole new dimension, it is as I sad before; The time slows down when you have fun, do you know why.

YouTube - WD Raptor vs Intel X25-M, programs

 

I thought "time flies" when you're having fun. If it slows down, wouldn't it be "time crawls"?

 

Everything is so fast that you have much more time to do other stuff. you working time "expands"

Have you heard about the "Twin Paradox"? You send you twin through space in the speed of light. From your perspective here on earth your twin will age and perform his actions much slower them normal because he travels with the speed of light.

Understand?

EDIT: "expands" --> more time --> slower

 

Well I just unpacked my new F12 from Costco and I'm updating everything right now will begin creation of the recovery discs and system image after that. I realize I haven't done anything on it yet but I already love it! I haven't stressed it yet either but so far it's quiet as a mouse. I have never had a notebook this powerful and this nice.

One question I have is I will be using this primarily as a desktop replacement so I don't foresee using it away from my desk at all so it will likely always be plugged in. What is the best way to store the battery? On my current 3-year-old Sony, the battery has always been in the notebook even though I never use it with the battery.

 

I have had the F11Z1E/BI (720QM, 8GM,500GB, Blue-Ray writer) with the European matte screen for two weeks. I am a photographer and have specially bought it for photo retouching using Photoshop CS3 and Intuos 3 tablet. Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom are "flying" with this machine when i edit big raw files from Canon 5D mk-II. I am totally in love with it.

I was going for the Mac Book Pro 15" but once i saw the matte screen of the F11Z1E/BI in the Sony center, i changed my mind completely. The Sony matte screen has excellent broad vertical & horizontal viewing angle, truer color, no glare reflection and very sharp screen.
If you are serious about photo editing, matte screen is the only way forward, full stop. Gloss screen can give you false saturation and contrast even the photos look more "pop" on gloss screen.
I would have to pay serious amount of extra money to upgrade the Mac Book Pro to replace its standard gloss screen to matte screen and add 8G ram etc. It is ok if you can afford to blow a lot of money on over-priced Macs like many other photographers do but the F11 suits perfectly for me.

 

Silly me, I thought you were being figurative. Yes, I understand what you're talking about.

 

You could enable the Battery Care Function from within VAIO Control Center. you can custom set it to charge the battery to to any level you want. I usualle set mine to 50%, because I do take it away from home every now and then. You could go lower than that if want.

Oh, you're going to have sooooo much fun!

 

So before I plunge into this whole switching hard drive I have a few quick questions:

Recovery Disks vs. making a backup image, how do I restore the backup image on a external HDD?

If I get a new copy of Win 7 ultimate, should I do a clean install then or just do an anytime upgrade?

 

Sony_support:

So if you use an UPS then you can remove the battery from the F which may help cooling & prolong battery life.

HP_support:

Apple_support:

 

Anytime Upgrade keys are cheaper & easier to use to unlock features in your Home OS than doing a full Ultimate or full Pro generic install + all the custom things to add for the F: drivers, patches & Vaio_programs. They are not faster than the Home OS BTW, they just add a few features like XP mode, Domain Join, BitLocker encryption or language packs. See Windows 7 editions. Why would you need Ultimate for?

For the rest of the info, check Help and Support in your computer and search for: system image or read the OEM clean install guide linked in my sig below.

 

Regardless of what you do, make a copy of the vaio recovery dvds.
That's as an ultimate fallback.
With the recover dvds you can also restore the rescue partition on a new drive.

When making an system image with win7 you will be asked to make a boot cd as well.
With that you can restore the image then.

 

aa this...
YouTube - Sony Vaio F12 - VPCF12Z1E

sounds exactly like mine did. there seems to be problem with some systems but not others. maybe it is the 720qm that is fine and 740qm thats really sucks?

that beep was so annoying. sounds like you when you are following the edge on a cristal glass.. so annoying. does your vaios do this too?

 

Hi guys,

My F12 cto is also the same spec as the 12Z1E also arrived on Monday, Sony also didn't send me my tracking email, so was unaware the laptop was on its way, got home on Monday evening to find it had arrived.

Wednesday I received and email to say my Vaio had been shipped, funny that I'd had two days already.

Regarding the noise issue people keep banging on about , I don't find it unbearable and I am susceptible to certain noises that other people don't hear, what do you expect with a super powerful quad core processor, my main desktop PC is about 10-12 times louder but then that has 9 fans inside it, six are apart of the case (Silverstone TJ07).

As I mentioned in a earlier post I work in the IT industry and part of my job when not fixing servers is to fix/reformat desktops and laptops and I would say that although my new F12 is noisier than most of the laptops I repair, none of them are anywhere near as powerful, most are Dell Latitudes.

I haven't done a massive amount to it yet, I plan on doing a clean install in the next few weeks, I have installed
Office 2010 Pro Plus and removed some of the bloatware Sony insist on installing, it appears to be very quick, I mainly purchased this laptop for Photoshop CS5 and can see it is it going to be very fast .

I would say any one having any doubts about getting one, I can highly recommend.

Don't know if this has been mentioned yet as I have been away from the forum since Tuesday, the Euro keyboard doesn't have translucent keys so you couldn't replace single keys when purchasing a US backlit keyboard.

 

thats also the sound of my NB.
I see that the whining/high pitched noise comes @2500-3200rpm.

 

THANKS for your reply, The exact model i will be getting is ''VPCF12V5E'' is the keyboard still compatible. Thanks in advance.

 

I am still having problems doing a system image backup , this time with another ext HDD over eSaTa and enclosure. Btw, both ext HDD havebeen used in the past with a WDTV media player.

I am now doing a full rather than a quick format of one of the ext HDD. Should I enable file compression as one of the options for formatting ?

It said backup had failed or something like that with a red progress bar. I wish it could tell me why. ..

 

A quick NTFS format, without compression, should have been fine. Have you run check disk for any errors on the HDD? I had issues with making images. have you restored from an image before with this system in particular? Try it again and see if it's just failing or stating that the drive doesn't have enough space. I had problems, after restoring from an image, where I could not make another image because of something Windows had done with the MBR partition. It added some data to it and then there wasn't enough room for the shadow copy for the image to be made. It cleared itself up after another restore to my first backup. Now, things are just fine. Anyway, that was my experience. Perhaps yours is similar.

 

Thanks for this. I was interested to know this. Do you think if you swap for the US backlit keyboard, will the f11 know how to use it properly automatically ?

 

Is that check disc for the f11 hard drive ? I have defragged it recently. It has been showing persistent problems despite me 'fixing' it. I will try searching for and running check disc.

 

Anseio,

Is check disc in vail care? I have not actually restored using any ext hdd image before.

 

I just ran system tune up:

Disc defragmenter 0 problems found
Disc cleaner 998 problems
Registry defragmenter 0 problems
Registry cleaner 594 problems

I have clicked 'fix the problem' which completed, then ran system tune up again, now says,

Disc cleaner 5 problems
Registry cleaner 591 problems.

Will try running tune up again to clear this.

Anisieo is this the same as 'check disc' ?

 

Be Fast --> Be Cool --> Feel the Breeze

 

I tried with power dvd and still the same problem it plays the clips before the actual movie but not the movie itself. Did anyone else experience this?

 

Thanks a lot for your quick and thorough reply! I just put the battery in the laptop!

 

Hi,

I did complete clean install (not using one of the tutorials straight from windows dvd) and now vaio care wont load up..i double click and nothing happens..everything installed fine (smart wii, control central works). I'm not sure if this is of any use but when i first installed it i got an error saying the battery was not compatible with this pc. Looking for a fix online i found out the problem was isbmgr.exe so i disabled that. After installing several other vaio programs i enabled isbmgr.exe and didnt get any more warning messages however as i mentioned before vaio care doesnt load up at all now..

 

Go on Sony's eSupport site, download VC's latest update/patch
solved the same problem i had

 

Yep that is the sound my F12 makes. So is it only F12 / 740QM models? Is it because they use a different fan? I monitored the fan and it seems to do it at exactly 3480 - 3540 rpm. i've tried every power/thermal mode possible and it still seems to hit that rpm range a lot during normal web browsing etc. Every time I tell sony support about it they never understand what i'm talking about and think i'm complaining about the actual loudness of the fan blowing air.

 

i downloaded it off the site only a few days ago before i formatted but ill give it another go..also how did you get your touchpad to work? i downloaded the alp driver on the sony support website but scrolling etc. doesnt work..

 

My college gives me a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, so why not take advantage of it?

 

You seriously should just use an anytime upgrade key. It'll save you alot of time from restoring all the data back in

 

The latest Windows Update (15 updates) caused my system to fail to recognize the Atheros wireless network adapter driver. System would not recognize any networks. Uninstalled, then right clicked onto Network adapters and scanned for hardware changes. After doing this all is well. Apparently the recent update has caused this problem for many people. YFI

 

... this redo backup is taking a while, 200gb size, 50% progress, 2.5hrs via Esatsa, copying files to H:\...

suddenly "57% preparing to backup", now creating system image of C:

 

I will need to test this, any one know a good db monitor for android?

My F12Z is quite, almost every time when I use it, or is my ears that bad. Then I should stop to test headphones regularly. :O

 

Just input his key (IF it's unused & legit) in: Start > search: Anytime Upgrade and it will work. My point if for somebody w/o a Win 7, it's cheaper to by a Anytime Upgrade key and and use it on his OEM F Win 7 OS. There is absolutely no differences in performances/features compared to a standalone Ultimate. The only difference is that Microsoft makes less money.

As mentioned in the OEM clean install guide, I did that on mine as I needed the laguage pack (Spanish & German OS). You did not reply: why would you need Ultimate again?

+1.

Yes, don't follow ilfuca's or my guide or Sony_esupport clean install instructions & you will have several problems. For example:

Good luck!

*****

For others who want to try a clean install: before attempting anything:
- Create recovery discs (to preserve factory state, DL not good, 2 or more DVD's depending on factory installed software & if it's a F11_or_F12)

 

I made a clean install from a Win7 DVD and I downloaded the drivers from the E-support and updated software, then I use the Recovery discs to reinstall wanted apps. Did not have any issues, like cutting hot bother - no resistance.

 

Have you muted the mic or set the mic output to optical out? Because if you don't do this, your F Series will make these odd high pitched noises and it has been well documented. Google 'Sony Vaio F whine'. Some folks refer to it as 'morse code' because it sometimes sounds like a sequence of beeps.

If that doesn't fix it, then I guess you need to observe a bit more. Where is the noise coming from? Can you trace it to a particular area on the pcb? Does it change in frequency during activity of other components? Is it mechanical or electrical?

There are many reasons for what it could be. I've seen one person experience odd noises that seemed to come and go with hard drive activity and that turned out to be a loose screw in the 3.5" drive bay. Basically it was a badly mounted HDD and the noise was mechanical resonance of a rattling screw when the HDD platter spins up.

I have also had what I thought was a rat in my room and this turned out to be a squeeky bearing in my gpu fan. Most of the time, noises coming from your computer are going to be due to mechanical resonance - fan bearings, loose fitting screws and rivits etc.

When people complain of high pitched noises coming out of their computer and its not mechanical then 95% of the time I immediately think of a switching power supply thats about to fail. So if you can rule all the other possible sources out, trace the noise to the PSU then you probably want to contact Sony and send it in for repair/replacement.

 

That issue was resolved on F12 notebooks. I tried the fix anyway the first day i had the notebook and it doesn't change anything. This has something to do with the fan itself.

I'm sure some of you are tired of me talking about this but I really want to know what others are doing that have this issue, as SonySupport does not seem to want to help me with it.

 

I found out straight away that the rat in my room was my desktop gpu fan after I powered it up with the case off and stop each fan spinning briefly with my finger. When the squeaking stopped I found my culprit. Get the WD40 out too and grease those bearings but these types of problems should be fairly easy to diagnose and fix.

 

The backup is supposed to have completed successfully. The space used up on the ext hdd now is 257gb, it was 0 before the backup.

Now on the ext hdd , there are only 3 files, one has an icon with a green downward arrow, another is called WindowsImageBackup and the 3rd is MediaID.bin

But under properties the 1st says 0 files, 0 folders, as does the 2nd. The 3rd is 528 bytes. ?! Where is all the data ?

This is concerning to me. Is there a way to check if this backup can be trusted ?

 

I reported this a month ago, exactly same issue around 3500rpm. Its like a weeeeoooo weeooooo noise thats high pitched. Perhaps its some kind of natural frequency at which the fan starts to vibrate or cause standing waves, causing that noise? My physics is really dusty.


At first it was giving me a headache, but now one month on with heavy use of my laptop I've gotten used to it and it doesn't annoy me anymore. Only when I decide to want to hear it, I notice it.

Definitely not a dealbreaker, but at first I was considering taking it back....

 

Does the full Windows 7 Ultimate package (assuming one already has it) include (or enable you to use) an "anytime upgrade key" as an installation option - or must an "anytime upgrade key" be purchased separate from (or instead of) the full Windows 7 Ultimate package?

In other words, my question is, if I have an F12 w/Home Premium and also already have an uninstalled full Windows 7 Ultimate package, can I use the Windows 7 Ultimate package to upgrade the F12 to Windows 7 Ultimate without having to do a full new install of the whole Windows 7 OS from scratch?

 

Joe, Anesiou , please ?

 

I search a pic from the NB what screws are to take off to see the cpu fan. it been 6 or 7 screws. I didn't find it. I think its posted from joe.

 

Sorry for making you wait. I was sleeping.

Each time Windows starts to make the backup it will make the folder WindowsImageBackup. If it failed, then that folder wouldn't have the stuff it should have in it.

You'll know the backup worked by clicking on that folder. The next folder will be the name you gave your PC, then a folder called Backup.... and a few others. Inside the backup folder will be at least 1 file whose type is Virtual Machine Hard Drive Image.

You can check the contents of that file this way:
Start > Computer Management > Disk Management. On the right side of the window, after the drives have loaded, click More Actions > Attach VHD. Browse for one of the Virtual Machine Hard Drive Image files, usually the largest and load that one. Disk Management will assign this new virtual drive a name (Local Disc) and a letter. It should also appear as a light blue icon, rather than white.

Once the drive is mounted, you can browse it like any other HDD via Windows Explorer. Look for the drive letter and begin browsing. It should have the exact same contents as your C:\ When you're done, eject the drive and restart your computer to fully get rid of the connection. If it does not look like your C:\, then delete that WindowsImageBackup folder and try the process again.

This has been my short term experience with making an image via Windows. Others use different programs, which are probably easier. I'm sure they could give a few recommendations.

 

If your win7 ultimate package includes a cd key, i believe you can try it, but it is best to do some research regarding if "Windows 7 Retail Package CD Key can work as an Anytime Upgrade Key"