Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *Part 5*

While I was waiting for your answer, I put it in hibernate for just 1 minute and woke it up and no problem with my brightness. I can try for 10 minutes if you think that would make a difference, but I think you may want to try reinstalling the drivers with a clean install. Instead of the express option, choose the other one, and make sure you choose clean install. I don't think waiting 10 minutes will make a difference in my results because I never experienced the dimming brightness during the install that you did so that is why I thought the clean install may make a difference.

 

i will try uninstalling from device manager and installing as you said
i need to go now will try this later
thanks a lot

btw is there any bios update for us?

 

nah, no new BIOS. the BIOS really sucks. never seen one with so few options.

 

"so few" hahhahahaha theres only 1 option "enable virtualization" boot priority and password doesnt count

when i press "display off" button the screen turn off
but when i press it again (to turn it back on) only half of the display "wake up" and after 5 seconds it turn off the display again
i have to press it to turn back on and increase the brightness to max

i have removed the nvidia driver from device manager>reboot>installed newest version with modded files>reboot
any ideas? maybe this version is really not supported...

 

Ah, this took me awhile to reproduce because I had my brightness at max and it doesn't happen to me when the brightness is maxed. But yeah, when I turned down my brightness, I get the same problem and have to max out the brightness again to recover.

Well, technically, the driver is not supported on our laptops. I'm keeping it on mine unless some other problem comes up. Since I know about the display off bug, I'll turn up the brightness when necessary. But if I find some permanent solution I'll post and let you know.

 

Hey guys, sorry if this was asked but is it easy to replace the standard HDD in the sony F with a SSD?

 

It should be. Lots of people have done it (not me). You can take a look at this:
How to Replace the HDD of a VAIO_VPCF Series Laptop

 

So unbelievably easy. See the link jpride gave you. It's very helpful.

btw. SSD's rock!

 

thanks a lot
we should have made some kind o benchmark before and after updating the driver

 

Are you consistently getting this message at bootup, if so what a nuisance. How to prevent the warning from popping up all the time ? Are we to conclude SMART is smarter or dumber ( false positive) than the other diagnostic software?

 

SMART is triggered by HD errors detected by the BIOS during bootup. Pending failure can be read right in the BIOS (Not sure how it's done on the F, it's not at hand.) So don't IGNORE the popup, but instead find out which drive is failing.

Also there are HD health utilities both in Windows and Vaiocare.

 

guys
on my desktop i can press F8 when booting to select where i want to boot is there anything similar here?

 

can anyone tell me what the little sign is when you are using the mouse and it just stops with some blue arrow. It happens to me soemtimes, kinda of annoying.

 

This appears to be another bizarre thing locked down by Sony. The only option you can get is which operating system to boot from - by pressing Esc or one of a number of the "F" keys.

There's something I found online you can try though. Someone said it worked on a Vaio Z. They said pressing F11 during boot will silently choose another boot device. By silent, I mean that boot options do not appear on screen but that it will simply try to boot from another device. There appears to be an order it uses so you may have to try more than once to get it to boot from your device of choice. Don't know if that will work, but you can try it out a couple times and see. I've seen two people say they got it working on their Z. Very annoying not to have a real boot menu.

 

I recieved the error twice on Friday. Both times after it had been powered down for at least an hour. Upon restart, or a short time powered down, I have not had it appear. From what I've read online, SMART issues are not the same as surface errors that diagnostic tools find. I'm also assuming that if there were a predicted failure in SMART that it should show up in SMART attributes. I've checked SMART attributes in HD Tune, Everest, Intel SSD Toolbox for all 3 of my drives and no warnings. I've run the full diagnostic for my SSD and it passed.

The only program that showed things different was Parted Magic, where everything rated as "old age" and "pre failure". I ran the diagnostics from that program too, and everything was clean.

Hmmm....

Funny, the only drive to NOT pass the tests was my OEM Seagate. From the beginning, it's had 49 reallocated sectors and will not pass beyond 10% of the Parted Magic SMART quick diagnostic. I'm going to contact Sony and see if I have to send in my VAIO just to get that HDD replaced.

I kinda wish that the warnings would indicate which drive. Since you mentioned it being captured by BIOS, I took a look at our very limited one. It has no options for SMART and what not, but does only show 1 hard drive, and that's my 80GB SSD. Am I then to assume that the warning was about my system drive (SSD)?

 

I wonder if anyone uses some battery discharge rate monitoring software?

I came across Passmark BatteryMon, but it is kind of inconvenient..

 

does anyone have the same problem as me with the touchpad, is it supposed to sop with some icon at times.

 

Don't know if new topics just flow here but here it is. I just received my f13 and it disconnects from my wireless in a matter of minutes or seconds. I have three other computers in my house running off my Linksys wireless G 2.4. I have attached my specs below and have searched many other threads but cannot come up with a solution. Don't know if I need a better router or if I need to change some configurations on my computer. Thanks for the help. I have learned a lot on this forum.

sorry this is my configuration

■LED Backlit Keyboard ■No Fresh Start ■Adobe Bundle (Free - $448 value) ■Blu-ray Disc™ Read and Write Drive ■Microsoft® Office 2010 Starter (Click More Info for details.) ■Standard capacity battery ■Norton Internet Security™ 2010 (30 Day Trial) ■NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 425M GPU (1GB VRAM) ■No Engraving
■Intel® Core™ Quad i7-740QM processor (1.73GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 2.93GHz ■16.4" VAIO Display (1600x900) ■320GB Hard Disk Drive (7200rpm) ■Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit ■4GB (2GBx2) DDR3-SDRAM-1333

 

Maybee your F is more sensitive to disturbance by any neighbour's WiFi. You may want to try and see if you keep having these problems with the WiFi router set to another channel.

 

Could you try booting up with only one of the drives attached at a time and see which one brings up the smart message?

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Also: completely unrelated, BUT it's pretty sweet. My 8800gs was showing horizontal lines. I figured I had nothing to lose and IT WORKED!!! Haha best fix ever.

Bake your Graphics Card in the Oven Fix - Overclocking.net

Apparently you can also do this to fix the YLOD on a PS3 (the baking/cooling melts and reconnects the soldering under the cpu/gpu).

 

Did you bake some cookies at the same time? You've got to wonder who was the first desperate person to try this. The mother of all invention.

 

Does anyone know a good site to order F series compatible parts?
I'm sick of listening to the whinning of my fan...

 

Are you thinking of replacing the fan? If you forum name is Noisyvaio why do you not return it and get a different laptop? There is no way to determine if you are upset about the same sounds coming from my laptop or yours is worse. If I had to guess I would say the sound just bothers you more than most. If you are not happy, get something else. I would never modify a brand new unit for this reason, but I am interested in what you are thinking of doing. Would a hotter but quieter laptop work for you?

 

Ok I must say an oven fix is simply awesome and funny lol, I agree with Fishon... Who sat up one day and thought, OH I KNOW! Oven! When their GPU went on them lol, great job it worked.

________

About the sounds/noises here's a nice succinct sort of description of a few, I do like the constant "it's inherent on..." many people still seem to not get that part... not to say fan can't be to fault! But quite often people think fan so they hear fan.. Link here.

__________

As an aside, if anyone spots a European/UK reseller with either the NZXT Cryo LX or the Notepal U3 please tell me! I so should have bought one ages ago when I could :/ can't find either at all now

 

i think im used to my desktop
its like 5 years old so im used to fan noise
my F13 makes almost no noise even o full speed (its a US btw)

 

Which display do you have?

 

This probably isn't the case since you were at home, but you weren't running on battery power when this was happening, were you? Just checking because there are power saver options that affect the wireless adapter.

 

I figured out the problem. I needed to update the firmware on my linksys router. I found a lot of individuals who had problems but there were a lot of answers that did not work for them. I just went to the routers website and downloaded the firmware for the model that I had.

 

@anseio
The premium HD with glossy sceen

 

There are 2 I know of:
BatteryCare:
BatteryCare
and
BatteryBar
Osiris Development - BatteryBar, the most accurate battery meter for Windows
I personally use BatteryCare and helped to translate it in Dutch.

 

Is there any "tweak" i can do on the power plans on windows?

 

Hi Anseio -

I would agree with Wolverine, I have the US version (F13) and my fan noise really isn't a problem at all. I made a comment on a previous thread that the only time I notice the fan really working hard is if I am hammering on the CPU and it's not a "whine" IMO at all.
The latop isn't as quite as my work laptop (Lenovo T410), but it's still relatively quiet for the size of the processor.

Thanks.

 

Change / Customize Power Plans in Windows 7 - Windows 7

Also: How To Delete Built-in Windows 7 Power Plans (and Why You Probably Shouldn’t)

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/1620...-7-power-plans-and-why-you-probably-shouldnt/

 

I need a help. I got a new Sony Vaio VPCF134FX laptop. It makes weird strange noise when trying to talk through Skype. I don't have problem with old Lenovo laptop which has same version of Skype and uses the same wireless internet connection. I am sorry if it has been already discussed. Please let me know if any settings need to be changed to avoid this noise in using skype

 

Do I need to install special driver for USB 3.0 or Windows 7 do this automatically. The question about Clean Install of Win7!

 

Windows 7 does not have a driver for USB 3.0 yet.
http://darrenyates.com.au/2010/03/qa-does-windows-7-support-usb3-0/1552
http://www.everythingusb.com/superspeed-usb.html
You have to download a driver from Sony at the supportpage for your model.
For example: US Sony eSupport - VPCF134FX - Software Updates & Drivers
or: EU http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computi...0229663.exe&m=VPCF13M1E_H&ip=EP0000229663.htm

 

Thanks. Will read...

 

I'm in the process of turning my Recovery disc into a bootable USB flash drive. Just have to order a 16GB, will then do a full OEM install on my Seagate (which has now been repaired via the fantastic recovery center, though was not the drive with the SMART warning).

If it works, I'll explain what I did and how easy it was to do.

 

Has anyone had problems with this driver at all? Have yet to install myself.

http://www.station-drivers.com/page/intel raid.htm

 

Are you talking IRST 10.0.0.1046?

I've been using it since it came out. It made my system a bit snappier and did improve my boot times.

Get BootTimer and run it 3-5 times before the new IRST and then 3-5 times more after installing.

See my post in the SSD thread about the latest 2 IRST drivers and comparisons:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...marks-brands-news-advice-720.html#post6800136

 

I was wondering can ANY of you guys run PCSX2 on this? How is the performance?

 

I never install intel drivers pour Raid/Sata/Ata/Ahci 10.0.0.1046 and the system works great. Do I need to install them?

 

I have yet to take the time and get that set up. I know that mangosango uses it here and I don't think he has any complaints.

For those of us using SSD's, the Intel chipset drivers really matter. There's something about the chipsets that don't allow the SSD's to operate at their full potential, so we're always looking for the best driver.

-------------------------
RE: USB recovery media. I only have a 4GB USB drive, so but did move over all files except for the folder containing the OS and bloatware. Using "external" as the BIOS boot option, I can get the VAIO Recovery Center to launch with only the hardward diagnotics (would have more if I copied the data folder).

This might be a safe and small way to store the recovery instead of risky discs. Well, I don't know how risky this is. I got the idea when Fishon posted about Apple not including the optical drive and instead including recovery media on a flash drive.

My dream is to have a 512MB for Ultimate Boot CD, and 16GB for Recovery disc.

 

Thanks lot, the Gray Wizzard!
I'm trying them both.
Since Vaio F (esp. with i7 processor) is so tight on
battrery life, and I do not really like added weight and volume of extended battery, it makes total sense to me to apply some efforts in
devising a way to reduce power consumption in existing configuration.

where a detailed report on energy spending is needed.

For example, in my old pentium laptop I was able to increase the battery life quite seriously simply by
UNDERVOLTING the processor with "RightMArk CPU clock" utility.
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything similar for the i-series of processors.

 

Anyone have their vpcf119x motherboard changed out of late with a new one under warranty.

My I-Link port was having some issues which I posted here in the past and then I think Melody was spot on about the chipset needed to be a T.I based firewire port for my application.

well anyways I decided to use it for my video camera and I couldnt get it to load up and after observing closely the port felt loose.

long story short Sony is sending a techy out to my house this week to put a new mobo in under warranty(how nice of them).

Im wondering though if someone has had this done because im curious if sony will put the same exact part in or a revised board. Another thing too is the fact that some of those parts like cpu and wlan card stuff like that will get pulled from my mobo and dropped onto the new one. That part makes me a little nervous after reading some of the past on site horror stories here.

I guess Ill find out soon enough either way but I hope they just bring a drop in with all the parts attached because it seems like a surgical procedure and I dont want my vaio having other issues after the repair if you know what I mean.

It wouldn't be to shabby if they dropped in an f12 board ( I don't think the f13 would work but wouldn't mind the new nvida card and some usb 3.0) or a revised board which im assuming im getting. Well see.

Ill post the final result after the repair.

 

I have a really random beginner question:

I recently ran a processor-intensive chemical structure prediction program (Wavefunction's Spartan to be specific) and after 3-4 hours it finished the job. This is great considering some people's computers took 12+ hours to get an answer. What concerns me is that the CPU meter gadget showed that no more than 14% of the CPU was used at any one time (when I ran 2 instances of the program running 2 different jobs it reached 28%).

My question is why didn't it hit 100% and finish the work 7x faster?

I feel like I'm misunderstanding some fundamental computer topic >_>

(I realize this isn't really very Vaio F specific, still I really don't know, so better post here than somewhere else =\)
(Specs: VPCF11NFX/B, Win7 64x)

 

Regardless of whatever horror stories you'd read, and I've read a few too about really bad servicers, remember this...

You, at any point in time can stop the tech from doing anything to your lappy. It is your property and you waive no rights be refusing to allow the tech to work on your machine if they display behavior that could be potentially damaging (forcefulness, lack of proper VAIO knowledge...). If you're unsure, make the tech leave and make Sony send in a pro.

 

I'm not sure this is a beginner question, and I'm far from being able to answer it well.

I guess my first thought is "did the processor even need to go up to 100%?". I mean, it's a quad core with 8 threads. What kinds of CPU's are you comparing this to? Which CPU do you have on your VAIO? I think there's a point where CPU speed just doesn't matter if the program cannot keep up with it in the writing/caching of data, or something (out of my knowledge set). The bottleneck being somewhere else.

Take video conversion, for example. I have a few .m2ts (bluray) movies that are 20-30GB a piece. I can compress them to smaller .m2ts files via DVDFab or AVSConverter. In either one, a 20GB movie is estimated at 15hours to convert. This is using both my CPU and GPU to handle the conversion. Neither of which, however, ever get anywhere near full capacity of 100%.

Though I'm not likely to ever be in your shoes, I'm curious to know what others have to say about your situation.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think memory could have been a factor. Wouldn't calculations like that require writing a ton of data to RAM and/or virtual memory (page file)? If you're on an HDD, you'd be bound by its speed limitations. Would an SSD be faster?

For example. I've been scanning in photos from film slides and negatives. I'm up to about 800 of them ranging between 5 and 15MB each. When those photos are on my 2ndary HDD, it takes a few minutes for all of the thumbs to load into Picture Motion Browser, regardless of my CPU capabilities. When I store the photos on my SSD, the thumbs are loaded within seconds.

 

Well found a link to a guy asking for which computer to get and he describes how he gets better CPU utilisation by running 4 simulations at once but highlights the problem that it requires the 4 simulations to receive information fast enough to not bottleneck. I'm guessing it's poorly optimised as it's from 2008 and probably has Uni students in mind not sure . I'd either run 4 at once like him, or try see of there are specific arguments it can be run with to force it to use more .

Link here.

 

Anseio his specs are as follows,
SONY VPCF11NFX/B NoteBook Intel Core i7 720QM(1.60GHz) 16.4" 4GB Memory DDR3 1333 500GB HDD 7200rpm DVD Super Multi NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M

I'd be guessing his 4GB of ram would be a bottleneck along with his mechanical hard drive. Only thing is we don't know if the program can utilise more than 1.5GB that most limit themselves to, I mean a poorly optimised computational program is unlikely to run on more ram as well. The HDD to SSD move may also help but it's a huge investment if it didn't help at all :/. Aside from that I'm wondering if the program utilises the GPU at all, would be good to do a few runs and note the GPU and CPU utilisations. This is all assuming max performance power plan and so on, other tweaks like disabling core parking etc could help.