Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *part 4*

F13s are on sonystyle.com! My f12 comes in tomorrow, might have to return it since I thought the f13s wouldn't be up until mid October.

 

Hi,

İ have a problem. Which programme i have to install to activate ambient light sensor on my VPC-f12Z?

Thanks a lot

 

oh thats good news! hopefully they come up soon on sonystyle.ca also.

 

Are you referring to the VPC-F1390X? If so, when customizing it the NVIDIA 425M GT is not present, you can only choose the 310 and 330...

 

Yea I seen that. The F13A and the F13B show the updated specs, however you can't order them as its says they're on backorder. If the prices on the site are right, then the price hasn't gone up from the F12s.

Looks like they have improved battery life too.

Edit: never mind, battery life for DVD playback is up, everything else is down

 

Hello all i am a new member,owner of vpcf11s1e/b i have some questions:
Firstly my vaio has the premium display screen right?(I live in Greece)
Secondly i install matt800 color profile,in the instruction says to set brightness to 100% to install the profile,that not going to reduce the life of the screen in short time?

Thanks in advance.

 

Go to Display, Change display settings, and from there you will see resolution options. The highest it offers is what you have. Brightness at 100% will not degrade your screen, just use more power. Enjoy your new F and let us know what you think about it after some use.

 

HILARIOUS!!!!!!! +1

 

Similar thing happened to me - I had to get my keyboard replaced. Sounds like you may have shorted one of the circuits that the keyboard uses to determine what key you're pressing. I would call sony and ask them to come and replace the keyboard for you - they should do it free of charge.

 

Messed up keyboard

But in the keyboard case above it was working fine & he has problems after disassembling himself the F for cleaning. He did not say how far in disassembling he went. It's maybe worth a try but it's not_Sony's fault in this case.

And considering a replacement keyboard for $35 shipping included, I'd rather change the keyboard myself instead of shipping my F back & forth and maybe have the tech see that it was a user created problem which could void the warranty for a more serious future problem.

Ambient Light Sensor

Most of us disabled that annoying "feature" via S1 > Vaio_Control Center > Display > Automatic Brightness because it dims the display when you don't want to while Fn + F5 or F6 let's you decide.

If you have the OEM OS, check the check box setting below. If you reinstalled the OS from a generic Win 7 disc then check the red box in this guide for Vaio_software that you are missing: Vaio_F Series Clean Install Guide w/ OEM Recovery Discs

Any feedback you could post about your VPC-f12Z? Like, dislike?



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Return F12_for_F13?

As everything electronic, the more you can wait the better should be the next version. Ask any Apple_product owner. It's all planned long in advance to make you want to get the next version.

If the price and configuration are similar, there is no question that an_F13 is better because the USB 3.0 ports are backward compatible to 2.0, it also has a fast eSATA/USB combo port & the GPU GT 425M is faster.

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Welcome to the Owner's club!

No, it will not damage anything but unless you are outdoors or something, it's better for your eyes & color nuance perception is better with a lower brightness setting.

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That's funny.

I just hope that we are not doing a Beetle-juice thing & invoking the beast.

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I'm not seeing it. I did customise an F12 on sonystyle.ca and was dismayed to find that the same configuration I bought in the UK is nearly £400 more expensive.

 

Yet an other reason to move to Canada.

Are you sure you compared the same LCD & not glossy vs the superior Premium matte? Can warranty is 1 year only vs 2 in EU. Don't forget things like current exchange rate fluctuations quirks ($ CAD fluctuates from par USD to -20% for example), competition/market share/pricing policies, state taxing more or less goods vs income tax vs services offered by the state.

 

Thanks for your answers guys.The profile looks good,my only concern is when i touch the screen in bottom is enough hot and i use many hours my computer because i do video editing and i concern about the screen.
Tomorrow i will install my new hard drive a Seagate Momentus XT and my old samsung as an external for storage so i look forward to use Joe's Guides replace disk and clean install!

 

I've been looking into a game where quad core would be utilized and am finding the gaming community is upset with game makers, feeling they are not producing games in which a quad core shows improvements over dual core. However, flight simulators (or at least this one) claim to utilize and show a 30% improvement over dual-core. Rise of Flight: The First Great Air War - Iron Cross is one of these games. If someone has other suggestions let me know.

From the article below: You'll gain a better bang for buck in your games from a faster clocked dual-core processor opposed to having a somewhat slower clocked quad-core processor. That doesn't mean though that quad-core processors offers less value. Contrary, and I know I've been evangelizing it for over a year now, but the future is multi-core gaming, the fact is just that dual-core is the sweet spot value wise anno 2008 as 95% of the games still only use one and maybe two CPU core

http://www.guru3d.com/article/cpu-scaling-in-games-with-quad-core-processors/1

 

You are welcome.

I normally have my LCD's brightness set at 2-3 clicks below the max & yes, when touching around the SONY_logo on the LCD's bezel, I can feel it being warmer than the rest of the bezel but that is the normal heat emitted by the CCFL's inverter that is transforming the current's voltage for the backlight CCFL tube(s). It's been like that for 7 months & everything is still working fine on my F.



What part of Greece are you from? I had the chance to live 4 months in Kriti and 30 minutes in the ferry bringing me back to Athena I was already nostalgic.

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How to Customize Your Windows 7 Taskbar Icons for Any App

How to Customize Your Windows 7 Taskbar Icons for Any App - How-To Geek

 

Very nice, could work well with rainmeter . Ways to customise your Vaio_huh.

 

I never commented on Rainmeter http://code.google.com/p/rainmeter/ but I really love the functionality and look. Anyone know how it is on resources? I am not a desktop gadget guy but I do like to customize my laptop look and do change things up from time to time.

Dexpot - Das Utility für virtuelle Desktops this does work with Rainmeter.

http://tokyodownstairs.blogspot.com/2008/10/deskhedron.html 3D desktop

http://tehnif.com/T3Desk.aspx

http://kaelri.deviantart.com/art/Enigma-103823591 default skin for Rainmeter

 

I don't use much of rainmeter's features, only for time, net speeds, weather, and email. I like my normal taskbar too much. Here's a screenshot of it in use and its usage (10MB)


click here for full size

 

On this Win XP laptop I have; time, weather, dates, notes, Gmail, BBC news rss feed, Engadget feed, itunes helper, net usage, uptime, power, HDD space, RAM %, quick launch buttons, recycle bin and temperatures. The temperatures are getting readings from SpeedFan. Speedfan takes 4MB and Rainmeter as I have it 19MB, CPU usage is very low so it's impact on this 4 year old system is negligable.

It's just about getting something you like . So that I don't take more of the thread off topic check the link below for screenshots of what users can create, some can be very good.

Screenshots

 

Thanks for the pointer, the shortcut trick to paste in Explorer is cool: %appdata%/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/Quick Launch/User Pinned/Taskbar

Not sure about the all black icons, differentiation is important for spotting speed & it may slow down an other person using your F (I know about creating an other user profile). Lots of shortcut icons here and here. There was a link in your article about to how to create a space which got me searching for separators. This one you just drag & drop in the taskbar but it consumes a lot of space also.

Also found this trick for centering the icons. It's taking me a while to get used to it, dunno if I'll keep it.

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@DeWinte: SpeedFan is useless for the F as it does not show the fan speed. The free CPUID's HWMonitor is more useful & very small.

 

Speedfan doesn't show fan speed on my alienware either it's purely for CPU GPU and HDD temperatures that rainmeter has a plugin to read. That I know of there isn't one to take measurements from HWMonitor, so yea although it's called speedfan it's the temps that are needed, and it's low resource .

 

After many fits and starts, I got IE9 beta to install, though I had to do it manually. FINALLY, a browser design centered around maximizing viewable space rather than cluttering with toolbars and crap.

 

Why finally? You can do that in Firefox instantly just by hitting_F11 or you can customize @ will what you want or not.

 

I've never liked F11. Do you think I didn't know how to do that? LOL

IE has such a bad history of toolbar clutter. This release recalls what it's like to see the content and not the browser. Firefox is nice, but it doesn't fully interact with touchpad swipes, or was that chrome. Pretty much, each of the 3 big browsers had something I liked and something I really didn't like. IE was the best compromise. IE9 gives even more viewable space, by default, than FF can do.

It's reminiscent of McAfee and Norton being RAM hogs, shaping up, and remembering that the operating system/hardward wasn't designed so the user could ONLY run antivirus.

And... I've got Everest OSD running at the same time. It's amazing how much IE9 is focusing on using GPU resources.

 

Chrome is better than Firefox in that regard since you can full screen older versions of IE with F11.

Chrome has a huge viewing area and is extremely stripped down which takes some getting used to. I had adblock running on it though and with about 20 tabs open it was using 3.6gb of RAM so I uninstalled it and switched back to Firefox which is fairly lean compared to Chrome at least provided you don't run any extensions. If you do, it can become a system resources hog. Then again, Firefox is kind of crap without extensions so now I find myself missing some things about Chrome which were super convenient.

Things I liked about Chrome: native auto translation (some folks here like to post pages from Sony Asia sites which automatically pop up in English for me and I think thats great). I like using the address bar to type search queries instead of having to navigate to google via a bookmark first. I like having multiple windows open and rarely browse web pages full screened. Often I have lots of windows of various sizes all over the screen and Chrome has a bigger viewing area than other web browsers if you like to resize your windows alot.

Things I don't like about Chrome: memory usage is worse than Firefox with limited or no extensions. To search documents you have to Ctrl+F every time you navigate to a different page which I find realllllly annoying. Lastly, theres no Spybot S&D integration so you can't immunize Chrome.

 

I have tried all of the browsers and, like others, I like something from each. I really tried to like Chrome. It seemed slightly faster than the others and I do like the auto translations.

In the end, I kept coming back to IE, especially after the problems I had UNINSTALLING Chrome! It did not want to leave my computer!

I have been watching IE9 and playing with the demonstrations for several months and I immeidately downloaded the BETA when it was posted a few days ago.

This BETA version of IE9 has been OK. I have not noticed any instability other than a few studders at first. It is not blazing fast, but I like the layoput. It is definitely quicker with moving Javascript than the older version. What I really like is that snap works with it. I love the snap feature on W7 and I could not understand why the feature couldn't be used when 2 windows are open in IE8 (unless you open two instances of IE8). With IE9, you can open a pair of websites and snap them to the corners.

I am still learning its features and have not been at the computer much in the last few days, but with a few tweaks, IE9 could be the best of the browsers, IMO.

 

This discussion could go on forever as everybody has it's own preference.

Maybe of interest: Usage share of web browsers

 

Wow. Internet Explorer dominates by miles. Just goes to show how the perception is totally out of whack with the reality.

 

Just remember betas are always being updated, often weekly, and usually not self updating. So if you are using a beta, you may have to uninstall and reinstall to keep up with the stability and security features.



At the end of the day it's FF for me.

In my opinion if you look hard enough FF extensions can do almost anything. FF most customizable, Chrome is fast and clean ( plus Chrome TV extension is cool), and it seems the new IE9 is going to be good as well. Security on IE is no longer an issue i.e. one better than another.

Addition: It's amazing to me how many business websites still only work in IE (the dynamic data stuff). For the FF user who does not want to be forced to open an IE window, I'm using IE Tab Plus. IE Tab Plus is a Firefox extension which enables you to use the embedded IE engine within tabs of Mozilla Firefox.

http://coralietab.mozdev.org/

 

Hardly. The numbers aren't quite as dwarfing when just home users are looked at. Many businesses and schools receive Dell and other large manufactures like RM computers that have only IE installed and are locked down for their users. There are a huge amount of computers using IE and not by choice. If you imagine a home having 4 computers with firefox chrome and so on, then one office with 50 computers all running IE.

Browser choice I would guess will soon become user preference and also maybe random, or just use what you're used to. IE with 9 seems to have addressed some of it's major problems so there isn't such a clear cut decision between the three. Some of us may toy between the three for a while! I do like chromes auto translation and the copy and search google with a right click also the ability to just duplicate a tab. These things may come to both FF and IE however it's not like it was a few years ago when FF was the only really good choice.

 

IE9 allows for tab duplication now, as well as having finally combined the search box into the address bar. Last night, I was having fun trying out the Test Drive site, which has a bunch of links to try out the various features and integrations of IE9. I had Everest running its On Screen Display to show me GPU usage. There were a few times a that my 310m was taken to 49-90% GPU usage rather than the browser only being able to use the processing power of the CPU. IE9 really is a different kind of browser and definitely worth toying with for a bit.

 

SSD's for under $150.00 USD and includes the hybrid Seagate Momentus XT in the review as well.

Budget Sub-$150 Solid State Drive Round-up - TechSpot

 

Typing this from my new F12 whilst my recovery dvd is being burned. Then in goes the Vertex 2 and out comes some pics!

e: Exhaust on the backplate is such a bad idea. My nuts are cooking here.

 

May I ask how many GBs with your Vertex 2 and the price? Why not the Kingston SNV425-S2 64GB if you got the 40GB?

 

120gb. Price was £201.94 STG and shipping was 4.99 I think. They have been collapsing in price recently.

Oh, and my recovery dvd failed 3 times in a row on the second disc. Now I've run out of dvd-rs and have to pick some more up tommorow.

 

Above & beyond feature y or z, one must not forget the agenda of who makes those browsers. IE was at standstill, not caring about W3C efforts to make the web universal & it's main mission was to maintain MS's dominant position, push MS's search & products. The same with Chrome, it's a Trojan horse to collect info & push Google's privacy invading products with the aim of being present in ALL aspects of your digital life. Firefox is non-profit & a collective effort & is not selling anything or collecting info on you.

My IE7 was crashing with only 8-9 windows opened while FF could take 20+. That was the tipping point for me. Where would IE be w/o Netscape & FF pushing it to get better?

When people mention feature y or z found in their browser x vs. FF it's probably because they don't know how to customize it or don't search the 6,000+ collection of addon's (includes advanced search & sorting including by versions).

Features of other browsers mentioned above for example:

- 6 Tips and Tricks For Firefox Address Bar including search & Awesome Bar swapping

- duplicate tab

- google translation

FF 3.6 features and the new Firefox 4 Beta and features.

Whatever the features frog leaping between the web browsers, in the end everything is relative to their core mission IMO.



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Recovery Discs Error

Recovery Discs are very important, especially if you wipe the OEM drive or install a replacement.

I would not run any other tasks in the background to be sure not to corrupt the process like you did. Also disabling the anti virus & killing any program opened on the taskbar is good practice.

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Small SSD

From this post: VAIO_F - SSD Bashing - Seagate XT Hybrid Alternative Real Life Benchmarks: [small SSD] need an external or secondary HDD drive for storage to complete a small SSD which in the end slows down the overall real life system performance and adds to the real cost of a small SSD. And that's not talking about the reduced battery life of operating 2 drives on the F. If one goes the SSD way, I would suggest to spend the money & get some storage capacity headroom.

 

I agree. I have foundthat workstations generally fill hard drives with about 40-50GB of total programs and files. For those, I purchase 128GB SSDs. My personal F11 has a 256GB SSD and I have it about as full as I plan on it getting...about 80GB. Over time, this may rise to a higher amount, but I will purchase and install an NAS before I have more than about 160GB on my laptop.

My recommendation would be to keep ANY hard drive, whether a platter drive or an SSD, no more than 2/3 full.

However, I have thought many times of getting a 128GB Kingston SSD for portable use.

 

I have a sore point with my OEM Toshiba THNS256GG8BBAA 256GB SSD. This SSD is TRIM capable, however, not TRIM enabled. I've heard Toshiba could do a firmware upgrade to make this happen but I know they will not. I guess time will tell about the degradation of the performance, but anyone have any thoughts on how bad it is not to have TRIM? I really did a lot of research before making the decision, read reviews where this SSD was TRIM capable- never thinking it would not be enabled! Having known what I know now I would have bought my own SSD and switched it out myself. Am I making too much of this? How pissed/concerned should I be? Tell it like it is...

Windows 7 - SSD drives with no TRIM support- just found this have not read at all. Makes me more upset to see 'with no TRIM support' when I have TRIM support but it's not enabled. So sad.

http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/44067-ssd-drives-no-trim-support.html

 

I <3 Firefox. Open source projects make me warm and fuzzy inside!

 

Does VAIO Care let you make recovery cds? It only gives me the option to make dvds for some reason. At this point I can't go any further since getting the OS onto my Vertex 2 is impossible at this point. Failing that, is it possible to restore from a recovery partition on a hard drive?

 

CD's storage capacity is too small for the recovery discs hence telling you to use DVD's.

 

Is it possible to restore from a recovery partition or create one on an external hard drive? I just wish they gave me an install cd and I would have paid for it to avoid stuff like this happening.

 

1- Yes but if your drive dies how will you use that to restore the factory state to a new drive?
2- Yes buy using the recovery discs.
3- There is a ton of F versions + CTO optional software. Creating your own DVD's is creating some customized for your F. Go to your F support page where you may buy a set, something like around $60.

Finally, you can use the discs to safely totally wipe the drive (or a replacement HDD w/o a recovery partition) & install the factory state w/ it's OEM recovery partition for selling or passing on the F.

 

I have my full recovery partition on my 2nd internal HDD, not that I'll really want to do a full intsall from it. I also make my system backup images to that drive. I was able to restore from that image w/ ease. Of course, I back all of that up to my external, just in case.

 

Agreed. Where would MS have gone with IE if they didn't have competition out there? How much of our system resources would McAfee and Norton hog if no one complained?

I'm happy that MS decided to go the direction they've gone with IE, though there are definitely some graphics bugs to be worked out. My issues w/ FF were not add-on related. I would push everything I could into a single strip across the top of my browser. Until IE9, Chrome was the only thing that did that. I'm not saying FF isn't a good product, it just doesn't float my boat on this machine.

 

How can I adjust the resolution or display of the screen properly so the picture looks better? The picture currently looks light and dull. I'm use to a bright vibrant screen

 

I agree with most of what you wrote. Did you see the screen cap of Firefox 4 Beta I posted above w/ the orange drop-down & max display space for content? Why not try it vs your IE 9 Beta?

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Monitor Settings & Resolution

A LCD is always at it's best in Native resolution. Check this & follow the guides in it for a better F viewing experience (including disabling auto brightness): Vaio_F Series Monitor Calibration and Users Created Profiles Roundup.

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Way ahead of you. Already compared side by side. IE has integrated the address and search boxes and moved it to the left of the tabs. Everything is on one strip across the top. FF, still has a tabs strip and a address/search strip:


UPDATE: just used the Aero Snap feature to compare your FF post on page 99 to my post. So nice to drag the tabs and have them snap. Compare. Then drag them back to the main browser window.

 

You should be able to do this in Firefox 4 Beta:



Note that there is only a thin bar above the tabs. And logical: the search & navigation is now below the tabs for quicker access. How does I9 Beta look w/ several tabs? BTW my FF does not display NBR's ads thanks to the Adblock Plus addon so it loads the pages faster.

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