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

Those are simply Seagate model generations. 7200 rpm, model series 11 etc. The numbers following "ST" are a more precise model number.

 

The descriptions on the Sony Canada site about the 425M and it's gaming capabilities are quite hmm, odd. Marketing should try a little harder than that, clearly they think Canadians like to game but, really? "Sporting the NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 425M graphics card with 1GB of video RAM, F Series laptops can handle hardcore gaming action with ease." handle, hardcore and ease being up for wide interpretation. I wonder if anyone would read that and think, oh my god I need that laptop above all others regardless of anything else that has me sold.

Edit: Just to add it confirms that it's an esata/USB 2.0 port and 2 USB 3.0 ports. Although we all knew that right? 2 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0 port wouldn't make more sense at all would it .

 

I posted about my F's keyboard not working a few days ago; turns out the keyboard was indeed at fault and had to be replaced. However, as I was looking for the replacement keyboard, I came across this. Needless to say I bought it and received it yesterday. Aside from the shattered screen, everything else is in perfect condition, including the motherboard and keyboard. I now have spare parts for my F

...then again, I could repair that Vaio and then have 2 functioning F's


Thanks to all that helped me with this issue

 

Guys the f series is for work,3D,photo,video editing is not for gaming i you want better GPU to play games go buy a gaming laptop.I installed Seagate Momentus XT and i think its worth the extra cash over a simple 7200 seagate drive i run Avid Media Composer 5 and i rendering more smooth now it makes me happy i cant imagine the speed with a pure SSD!!!Joe sadly i live in Athens for business purposes only but i am for a beautiful Ionian Island called Lefkada.

 

Guys i have a question for you can we upgrade our laptops except ram i mean CPU,GPU,Blue Ray Player to Burner if our mobo chip (Intel P55) support it?

 

You can not upgrade the GPU. You can however upgrade (or downgrade) the cpu. Essentially all the non low voltage i3,i5 and i7 mobile processors will run with the vaio mother board. All 3 processors run on socket PGA988. as for the bluray player drive, I believe as long it's a SATA optical drive that will fit in the space, you will be fine.

 

^ Agree with patrik about the F-series being a work/multimedia machine rather than a gaming machine. The cpu is great for video/photo editing and 3d modelling, the gimped gpu is basically sony's way of telling consumers "hey, we have this great game maching called the playstation and would rather you bought that because we get $10 for every game we sell on it. kthxbai! - sony."

I just think it's fun to see what games the machine will actually run (it's fun for me to see how much performance can be squeezed out of something - to see how far hardware can be pushed). People looking for a gaming laptop should look at the g73jh and its monster 5870. Incidentally, I saw the g73 at a bestbuy in boston and I have to say that it was MUCH larger than I thought it would be. It looks very cool, but it's much bigger than the f-series.

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This mouse.... I love it!!I know it's being billed as a gaming mouse, but I'm using it mostly for graphic design at this point - I got fed up of my cheapo wireless mouse cramping my wrists and disconnecting all the time. It looks very cool. Really cool - I wish I had something other than my crappy phone camera to take some pictures.

And what a mouse this is. Glides like air over my cheap steelseries black mouse pad. There were some pretty bad reviews citing the poor z-tracking performance of the philips_twin-eye sensor they put in this mouse, but I'm not having any issues (even on my black mousepad, which supposedly was the culprit for the tracking problems). I skipped the driver cd completely btw - just downloaded the latest drivers from the madcatz/saitek website.

It's is bit on the heavy side - I removed all but 2 of the weights and I would say that it's pretty hefty compared to most mice I've used. The build quality is fantastic though - soft plastics and a steel chassis underneath.

The mouse is super comfy and I've customized it so that the thumb rest is moved a little further up (my hands are smaller than average and I like to have my fingers far up on the left/right mouse button). I also swapped out the normal pinky grip for a "pinky shelf" they've included, which provides a nice place to rest your pinky. The center scroll isn't one of those flywheel type scrollers that let you scroll over long documents, but the click that separates each time the sensor records a wheel motion is just right so that you can tell that it's registered (good for switching weapons in fps games), but also loose enough to provide little drag when scrolling down a lot (personally, I use the MMB to scroll over long documents). Most comfortable mouse I've ever used - without question.

For people who like to play fps's, there is also a sniper button on the side that lets you drop your dpi to a set percentage of the normal dpi while it is being held down - great for lowering the dpi when you're trying to get a headshot in (I like to use it in photoshop when I'm painting things pixel by pixel ). There is also a rocker switch below the mouse wheel that lets you instantly adjust between 5200, 3200, 1600, and 800 dpi. I like to keep it at 3200 for normal use (5200 is WAYY to sensitive, but in Mass Effect 2 raising the dpi is a fun way to scan planets more quickly ).

The only really bad thing about this mouse is the included software. It's not very intuitive and while it provides adequate functionality (on-the-fly toggle between 3 customizable button configurations, keymapping, mouse dpi/sensitivity adjustments) it's not the easiest to use. At $99 msrp I would've expected a cleaner UI for the mouse software.


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Finally, some new game videos (I'm downloading the Civ 5 demo right now so that will be up soon):

HAWX -
YouTube - Hawx Gameplay on Sony Vaio F11
YouTube - Hawx Benchmark on Sony Vaio F11

Game is fully playable. During gameplay average of 40fps - rarely ever dips below 30 (only on 1 mission - Typhoon, but that's because it's raining like crazy and you're flying over Tokyo).

The benchmark averages 36fps without fraps (much smoother than when fraps is recording).

 

Seems like the F1390 price on sonystyle is lower than usual. Anyone know specifically which Nvidia graphics card it comes with? They don't give you a choice (or clarification) on the site.

 

Any problems with the high pitch noise for the new model VPCF13BFX/B??

thank you in advance
cheers

 

Since it's nobody received one yet, I'll ask my clairvoyant & get back to you soon.

 

well the new monster for game playing... is the new ASUS G73Jw

with an NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460M, with 1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM

ASUSTeK Computer Inc. - Notebooks - ASUS G73Jw


the only real limitation of my Sony F, is when you have to make complex PDF files (more than 1000 pages , heavy graphics, and a lot of color scan pages) the gt 330m , is not so powerful to do those tasks...or maybe adobe needs to improve their pdf tools and use some CUDA acceleration to handle complex PDF files.

It is wierd that I have not seen any benchmark on these topic.

 

I don't think that Adobe codes their pdf viewer to utilize gpu's. IMO Adobe needs to make their code better, or whoever makes the document needs to optimize for performance (low resolution graphics, consolidation of graphics, etc). Using a large background image for each page, for instance, will cause slowdowns.

I don't think that a document viewer such as acrobat reader could be coded to use the parallel processing of gpus actually - or rather if it would benefit that much. gpu computing only really helps out if you can massively thread your applications (i.e. code the program so that it can have something like 216 separate threads). It becomes a read headache, because you need to make sure that all the calculations in each thread are completely independent, or that no thread has to wait for a long time for another thread to finish etc.

IMO having a large amount of ram/an ssd or fast hdd would speed up 1000+ page pdf documents more than anything, as the main issue is probably getting the data from the hard drive and loading it to memory for viewing, rather than the actual rendering process.

 

thanks for your reply mangosango...

but I was refering to CREATE a pdf document..not just displaying it.

I create .pdf docs (ready for publishing)...combining sources from Latex, mathematica, Excel, etc... using a lot of 3d images... huge graphics... and a lot of scientific notation.....

My desktop computer (a q6600/4gb )uses an old nvidia quadro gfx card...and it is faster that my vaio F(i7-720/gt330m/momentus XT 500gb hd/8 Gb ddr3 mem) on those tasks...

 

^ Not sure then, sounds like you know more about this than I do heh. My only guess is that it has something to do with the clock speed on the q6600 being faster than on the i7. Maybe the q6600 has more cpu cache? idk.

 

anyway I'm very happy with my VAIO F... but sometimes I guess those gfx performance improvements(due to nvidia driver updates) are limited to games and some apps.

ps: I'm a fan of your games' performance videos, in my case the only 2 games I play are an old copy of Fritz...and Pandora's Box(too bad I have not found anything similar nowadays)

 

thank you for your prompt response buddy..i look fowrard to hear from you guys in regards of fan issues

PeAce

 

Joe thanks for all your comments and solutions you offer to improve the screen quality, very appreciated. With all the respect thought I did try everything possible on sonystyle store to improve the quality, meaning deactivating the sensor and setting the brightness in MAX and still the screen was nothing comparing with other VAIOS or the competition. Second my cousin in the US got the F12 after he saw my other cousins F12 bought from EU. We put both of them side by side and boy the US model screen was, as I said..LAME... I don'e even want to describe...

Of-course when my cousin saw that and experience the comparison with the EU model, he sent his US F12 back for a full refund without any second thought.

I am following VAIO since their first year of introduction, while I owned A-LOT of them all high-end and all of them had pretty amazing screens in every possible way, resolution, viewing angle, brightness etc. I know what is good and what is not acceptable (at least for me) and for me the screen for the F12 in the USA is just NOT acceptable.

The configuration I go is close to $2000 includes 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD, i7, 1080p screen, Blu-Ray burner. And for that specs for that money, for a high-end laptop I do expect the screen to be first in line to serve my needs. After all this is what I see most of the hours of my day and I need my eyes to be happy.

Question, from the comparison above I noticed the camera on the Asian models are listed for 0.3 Megapixels

I am pretty sure I show on the Japanese website that the Motion Eye is 1.3 Megapixels and SonyStyle.com specs use to list it for 1.3 Megapixels as well (now they do not include megapixels at all).

So how many Megapixels is the Motion Eye for the US model?

 

Then why not move on to an other brand thread? The most important tweak that you did not do in the store: install a custom monitor profile. And if you tweaked the settings then who knows what other shoppers did to it before you?

Did your 2 cousins compared also the price they paid?

Maybe some other US F owners could chime in about what they think of the max brightness? From the monitor profile article I linked to: The cd/m2 set to max on mine: 248.4 vs the 265 cd/m2 reported in their review (for the matte premium). That's not night & day & was measured in the center of the display with my X-Rite i1display 2 (same instrument as notebookcheck's) and confirms what my eye balls can see since 7 months. Look at the brightness data for other similar laptops on notebookcheck.net & that's average, not lame.

I'm still waiting for you to name an other brand/model of laptop sold in US with similar specs as the F, similar price but with a matte full Adobe RGB color space coverage LCD like the optional Premium for the F in EU & other markets.



Is the F 1080p Premium matte superior to the 1080p glossy? Yes. Would I have paid extra to get one if it would be offered in US? Yes. Why Sony_does not offer that option in US? My guess: their marketing studies showed that the majority of US consumers want glossy & inexpensive. There are not enough of us who would pay more for a superior display & anyway as the F owners display poll shows, a majority are satisfied with their display.

*****

 

Not to sound like a broken record but hasn't anyone figured out what model LCD the nice one is yet? >>

 

eSATA is most definitely gone, in the Portuguese website, the F13s are now available, you can see here a comparison between the 3 models available in the PT website, and the eSATA as a NO (NÃO in portuguese) on them :

Comparação de produtos : VAIO e Informática : Resumo : Sony

I'm thinking on getting the Z, as the M model has only 4GB of RAM, there is no S version, at least here (in the UK it exists), and the Z costs 1699€, it's more than 100-200€ than I was expecting though

 

Check Sony USA under specifications, the picture shows the USB 2.0/eSATA port on one side and the two USB 3.0 ports on the other. This was discussed in previous pages. The power over eSATA port is still there, just check even your own link, "USB SuperSpeed (USB 3.0) x2 - Velocidade de transferência até 2,5 Gbit/seg... Porta USB de alta velocidade (USB 2.0) x1". One USB 2.0 port wouldn't make much sense huh .

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The customised E series looks pretty nice on the USA site, ATI 5650, i5-580 2.66GHz turbo to 3.33GHz etc. Shame the case seems so cheap, but a decent option for some browsers of the thread that don't require quad core and want a slightly better GPU.

 

Or check Sony_Asia: VPCF137HG/BI.

 

I saw your howto before, thank you for the clear, simple and well documented description! That is why I already ordered all the parts necessary as well as a backlit keyboard. Us Europeans cannot order those, probably because of the national differences in keyboards, AZERTY, QWERTZ, UK, etc. etc. Us Dutch are 'lucky', we're too small to qualify for our own keyboard so everything is US Int'l. ;-)

 

Hi all two questions. I have searched and no luck with question one.

1) I am using Media Gallery for my music and pics because windows media center blows (doesn't put all the music from one album in one folder, it just shows all the songs and make a huge cluster of crap). Media Gallery works great for my music but it doesn't show any of my pics. I go to settings>content management>set folder to monitor. But it doesn't work because it says "VAIO content monitoring settings cannot be launched because it is not installed" I checked my recovery discs and that app is not there. I also went to the driver downloads on Sony and nothing. Anyone know where I can get this file or at least make media gallery find my pics.

2) All of a sudden my pc is slow as hell. I have disabled everything from start up and when I turn on the pc everything flies but to load up the desktop I get a black screen then after a minute it loads. I did vaio care and nothing. Any idead to speed up the start up to the desktop?

 

2) can you clarify on what you mean by "slow as hell"? Does that mean slow application loading times? If so, what apps, does that mean low frames per second during games? if so what game, settings, res.
When your VAIO is "slow as hell", CTRL ALT DEL, open task manager, and check the CPU usage, RAM usage, and the number of processes in the Performance tab, also in the processes tab, press the "CPU" on top of the columns.
You can try Joe Bleau's clean install which works magically for both F11/F12 owners: Click Here
This will remove any Sony crapware which hogs your RAM resources and at times, even CPU (ei. Vaio Content Metadata Intelligent Analyzing Manager and Vaio Content Metadata Intelligent Network Service Manager, which is COMPLETELY useless and eats up your CPU cycle to scan your folders)

You can uses this application called Autoruns to find any startup programs you don't need and delete the registry keys that causes the startup


Lots of these questions have been answered in a way, so please use the search this thread function

 

When the system is fully loaded meaning all is booted up. The notebook is really fast. What kills me is the time from when you enter your password in the win7 login screen and that long wait of the desktop to get loaded

 

Go to User Acccounts an create a new profile with Admin rights. Log out, then log in to the new profile and see how long it takes. Ideally, it should load up as fast as your original profile used to. This will mean that you have a program in your startup that's hogging things up. If the new profile launches slow as well, then I've got no clue.

Inside the Autoruns program is a LOGON tab that shows you the programs that launch after you click to log into your profile. It could be any on of those programs in the way. You can play with unchecking questionable programs one at a time and see what happens.

 

Anyone replaced VAIOs Stock 1333 MHZ Cas Latency 9 RAM?

I use After Effects CS5 alot for 1080p video editing, and the 720QM does extremely well rendering the clips, but the video preview in the editor's frames per second playback and choppiness is directly dependent on the speed/size of your RAM

I was looking at some laptop memory and I found THIS.. WOW
Newegg.com - Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1866 Laptop Memory Model KHX1866C9S3K2/4GX
1866 MHZ Laptop RAM

I wonder if that would be compatible? (I doubt it )

 

Haha, don't think the motherboard chipset supports ddr3-1866, although that would be nice.

@ cirrusbarbs - have you tried defragmenting your disk and running disk cleaner? That may help with boot times.

 

Rubber Palm Rest GlueWhat's wrong with rubber cement? Epoxy is radical in this case & next to impossible to remove besides not being flexible.


*****

I am not sure any more if I can use any type of glue. I think that heat makes the rubber expand so the adhesive doesn't work anymore (in this case a type of tape sony uses). It looks like I would have to cut the rubber around to the correct shape and size in order to fit it back. I will try again to reach the Sony "service".

 

Just wanted to thank this forum for the Firefox 4 beta suggestion. Panorama is wonderful and the search feature available in the latest trunk makes it even better.

However, the speed and efficiency of this build is incredible. My guess is that they deactivate activity in non viewable tabs to achieve it.

I'm testing it on an old Dell XPS Gen2 with a single core processor and it simply flies whereas usually with lots of tabs open Firefox gets bogged down to a crawl.

I'm impressed and I'll stick with it.

BTW, download the latest flashblock beta from here.

 

Hi, New here.

I just ordered two F13's CTO for me and the girlfriend. Can't wait to get it.

I just got it with the standard processor, 1080p screen, and a backlit keyboard. I plan on upgrading the ram to 8gb and upgrading the hard drive.

I was curious if anybody has used the seagate momentus XT drives on their vaio without issues? reviews seem to indicate that there are issues with it spinning up and down and eventually crashing. But there are also a lot who seem to be happy with it. I'm still hesitant on gambling with it and might just get a normal 7200rpm drive for it.

Thanks

 

Today I played quite a bit with the latest trunk but it still has a lot of rough edges. I'd recommend staying with beta 6 until things settle down. The search feature of Panorama is a nice feature to look forward to though.

 

Is there anyway to make the VAIO button control windows media center? I did a fresh install and it came out great. Since I dont have media gallery the button now control mute on or off for my volume.

 

I've had a 500GB Momentus XT in my CTO F12 for nearly a month now and it's been flawless. I'm very happy with the speedy performance and I don't hear any strange/loud noises either.

 

so i went to work today noticing that the sony laptop arrangements looked different to find out that the new f13 came out.. BOO. im so angry
i love my f11 but seeing the f13 everytime i go to work is making me so so sad. haha. i could buy it for 1,100 too with my discount..should i do it!

 

Hi i have a few month old VPCF116FG .
When im surfing the net just a few the fan not that loud but louder than i think it should be and when i play sc2 it goes VERY loud like i can hear it from another room . is this normal for this computer?

 

So I went to Sonystyle to browse, and I known about F series for the longest time but I now just realized that Sony still decided to use Cathode fluoride yCF) lamps instead of LED... any specific reason as to why?

 

Go for it! Well, if you love your F11, I'd just grin and bear it actually....

But since you've seen it, can you tell us if the screen is the same as the F11/F12? Does your store model have an HD or the lower res screen?

I'm trying to decide whether to get an F13 with HD screen, save a little money and get an F12, or maybe just save money by getting an F13 with the lower res screen. (I really need a new computer, but I have large medical bills to pay off right now so that's why I may have to compromise on specs).

Thanks for any info on the F13.

 

Theres much more to a screen than how its backlit. FW had dual ccfl lamp backlight and that screen apparently looked amazing. The F Series EU Premium 1080p screen looks very good regardless of whatever the backlight method is.

 

You can use Soluto: Soluto ? Anti-Frustration Software
To see what causes and maybe fix the slow boot process.
Notebookreview: http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/486625-soluto-tool-help-speedup-startup.html
Lifehacker: Soluto Is an Awesome Tool to Speed Up Your System Boot, Fix System Slowdowns
Zdnet: Can Soluto really make PCs less frustrating? | ZDNet

 

No problems with my Momentus XT 500GB
For me it is the a very good upgrade coming from the stock 5400 rpm Samsung drive.
There is a thread on this forum just for this drive: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...e-momentus-xt-hybrid-hdd-w-built-4gb-ssd.html

 

I agree with regli's follow-up below after testing the Nightly Built Minefield:

I went back to the very stable: the latest official FF 4 Beta in 39 languages with Win 7, Mac or Linux versions. The most popular add-ons compatible with FF 4 here. AdBlock Plus is a must IMO. No need to download Firefox Sync as it's already included in FF4. Memory Fox seems to work quite well so far on my F to limit FF's memory usage. My only other add-ons so far are: Download Statusbar, Easy Youtube Downloader, Tabscope and WebMail Notifier.

If you uninstall any beta version: DO NOT select the option to delete the profile as it will affect any previous version you have.

 

An interesting deviate is Pale Moon.
Currently at version 3.6.9 and there is a very rough 4.0 beta 6.
The Pale Moon Project homepage

Main features:

* Highly optimized for current processors
* 100% Firefox sourced: As safe as the browser that has seen years of development.
* Uses slightly less memory because of disabled redundant and optional code
* Significant speed increases for page drawing and script processing
* Support for SVG and Canvas
* Support for Firefox extensions, themes and personas
* Able to use existing Firefox profiles with a migration tool

I'm using it on a Windows XP machine, because of a bug in Firefox 4 Beta with https connections on Windows XP.
On Win7 I use Firefox 4 Beta and loving it

 

No it's not normal. Maybe you have a lot of cr@p running in the background? Check with your Task Manager.

You can disable unneeded processes, drivers and Logon (startup) programs with the free, small & portable (meaning no install needed) Windows Sysinternals Autoruns. Just > Start > search: Create a Restore Point to be on the safe side before tweaking anything.

While you are there download also the free, portable & powerful tool called Process Explorer which works in tandem with Autoruns to gather info about a process or driver besides being able to run alone.

Try this also:



One can also run: ASSIST > Vaio_Care > System Care > One Click Care as the report links to some of the tools above.

Also it seems that SC2 causes a lot of problems on many brands & models of computers like loud fans, toasted GPU, etc. Try this search: playing sc2 fan loud:

*****

 

If you live in USA, this deal ends 9/28 on newegg: $109 including shipping.

 

ok i did all this but im not sure what the results mean, and also its not just sc2 but other games such as oblivion and HoN make it go very loud too

is there anyway i can show u the screenshots of the results?

 

That's a great find! BTW, what's the RPM of the 750GB HDD's you bought? I'm going to be in the market for a larger 2nd HDD eventually, perhaps a 1TB.

SC2 should cause your fan to work really hard. Are you using a laptop cooler, or at least raising the rear of your VAIO so that air can circulate underneath? Are you working off a clean installed system or a full Sony factory install. The factory install uses a lot more resources and would thus cause your fan to work more under more workload (I think).

 

For those of you with SSD's, check out this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...l-rst-10-0-0-1043-beta-out-3.html#post6742308

I finally decided to change from the defualt MS AHCI driver and compare boot times with the IRST 10.0.0.1043. I haven't really been impressed with the benchmarks from the IRST drivers, but the boot time improvement is significant. Check my post in the link above for my results.

Link to IRST drivers:
intel drivers pour Raid/Sata/Ata/Ahci

 

its just that my laptop is so much louder than 2 other cheaper and inferior laptops that ive seen running sc2 or any other games. my fan starts getting quite loud even if i just do an update or something, and im not sure about the clean installed system or a full Sony factory install. and no i dont raise the back or have a cooler