Official Sony VPC-Z2 (VAIO Z 2011) Series Owners' Thread

I have the i7 and its absolutely silent doing normal work. Times it gets noticeably loud is pretty much just installations and gaming.

Both screens are classified vaio premium display, and both are much better than the SA display. There are some minor difference (900p has slightly better contrast/brightness and higher saturation i believe?) but there are more or less the same. They are both brilliant displays.

 

Does anyone know if this model is still made in japan?

 

My US CTO unit was built in Japan. This was two weeks ago.

 

It seems strange that people get their CTOs so quickly. Sony Japan has me waiting a month to get this thing. How is it that that the Z is being made in Japan, yet other countries seem to be getting it faster?

::deep breath::Sorry just venting because I'm still Z-less....

 

can someone help me with these issue?

- anyone with WWAN unit in USA and did a clean installed figure out how to activate the service with sprint?
- the touchpad is really bad i think, i cannot put both of my thumb on left and right click at the same time, that is really bad if i have thumb on the left click pad the right click wont work : ((
- is there a way to trigger resume action when the lid is open like in the Z11?

thanks

side note: anyone that got annoy with 1sec delay when right click on desktop can delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\igfxcui folder in registry will fix it (what it did is remove intel option from the menu, you still can access it via control panel)

 

I wanted to provide some feedback after using the Z2 for a full work week, using this as my only work machine. I have the Core i7, 8GB RAM, 1080p screen.

The Z2 is a LOT more portable than my company provided Dell Latitude. I have a small incase bag that was designed for a 13in MB that seems to work ok, and it alot less to carry around than my full work bag.

This week i provided 3 demos running VMware. The images run Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Dynamics CRM 2011 and MOSS 2010. I was able to run the image, and it ran smooth as butter. The Z2 Supports hardware acceleration but you have to enable it in the BIOS.

I spent another day working from a coffee shop. The noise canceling ear-buds worked much better than i expected, and I was quite pleased with the battery life, even though when off the battery i have to turn the screen brightness up from the standard power saver setting.

The screen itself, i have not increased the DPI or used any zooming. I have to admit occasionally it is a bit small, but, i will take the FHD screen real-estate any day. As you can see, i build demo's, deploy code, etc, and i often need to have a word doc open side-by-side with a VM, and screen realestate makes this process ALOT faster.

I do miss how on my dell it has a little rubber snap-on strap on the powerbrick. The light-weight vaio brick is nice, but, i just wish the cable management was a nip better.

I have the PMD, but only really plan on using it when I travel so that i can play games in my hotel. All of the work i did this week was without the PMD. I should also say that I re-installed windows from scratch, and there were a few hiccups, but that process wasnt bad.

At some point i need to enable bitlocker, so I can report back how that goes. Has anyone enabled bitlocker yet?

 

Please do. Thank you!

 

for me out of the box, i charge my laptop and sheet battery to 100% full on both of them took about 3.5 hrs

 

To owners with the Z217GG:
There are two updates in the VAIO update.
Intel WLAN driver update to 14.1.1.3 (from 14.0.2.2)
Intel SATA driver HIPM patch

 

Today i´ve the problem with the after-hibernation-no-longer-working-fingerprint-reader again. Only a reboot will resolve this. Maybe there are newer drivers?

 

If you want to hear the fan at full speed, go into the hardware diagnostics in Vaio Care. There is a fan test that will spin both fans up to max. Those little boogers can move some air.

 

Has anyone experienced this?:
Sony vaio z217 defective product - 1 - YouTube
Sony vaio z217 defective product - 2 - YouTube

 

Did anyone manage to get Vaio Update working? When I start it, it looks for updates, and I get an error that it couldn’t load the information. And then Internet Explorer starts pointing to http://vu.sel.sony.com/perl/VU5InvalidInfoFile.pl which returns a HTTP 403.
That only happens in the information tab in Vaio Update though, I guess the actual updates do work.

Also: Did anyone try using a headset (with microphone) in the headphones jack? I would like to know if it’s possible to use a microphone other than the built-in. Looking at the driver it does not seem the case though (guess I need to get a USB headset then).

 

1st time experiencing the wait for a $2000 laptop to be delivered -___-

 

VAIO update works for me.
Updated a few hours ago...

 

The power button on my Z2 is a bit stiff, but I've not experienced any problems like those in the video.

To be honest, it didn't look like the dude was pressing very hard, and why would you take a 4 minute video where you're banging on the keyboard for half the time? My overall impression is that the video was unconvincing re showing that he had a defective product.

 

Theres probably just something wrong with his power button mechanically.

 

So much for fast boot. I'd exchange it or return it. Wouldn't want that problem to escalate any further. It took close to 3 mins. for it to boot after all that troubleshooting. Not worth the hassle.

IMO, I think he was pressing hard enough to make it turn ON. The top of his fingernail went from pink to white when he was pressing the ON button, which is an indicator that he was pressing hard enough.

 

Guys, I solved my bluetooth/smart network problems. Simply, I made every kind of windows update.. after rebooting everything was going magically.

About the "battery" problem I don't know.. I killed ISBmgr.exe from the start. Maybe now it'll work but... even killed, it's not a problem

 

What is the battery problem we were talking about? Was it the one where the sheet wont charge after 80%?

Theres a hurricane coming in a few hours, so this is the first time I charged the sheet all the wya up to 100%. This is what I noticed.

My laptop started at like 90% and sheet at 40%. The sheet charged to 80 and then the laptop charged to 100%. I noticed that it takes quite a while for the charge to go from 100% to display Fully Charged. Once it does that the sheet begins to charge past 80%. But it seems that it will go from Fully Charged to 100% sometimes, and thus the sheet willl stop charging....odd?

 

^ no, I'm talking about battery popup after installing location utility or vaio utility..

About the 80%.. it's a setting in vaio care if I'm not wrong.. I've just activated it, but not at 80% but at 50% since in these days I won't move from home.

 

Does anyone else get the problem where is your display turns off the fan starts going? For mine, if the display turns off but the computer is still on, the fan starts going pretty loud and when i move the mouse and turn it back on it dies back down.

 

i'm on silence mode so, no i donot have that problem

 

so anyone that did a clean installed beable to activate the WWAN with ATT or Sprint?

thanks

 

Hey guys, thinking about getting a Z seriesjust have a few questions (easier to post than reading 113 pages haha)
- Are there any major problems? Is the trackpad that bad?
- If I go to custom setup it says I can add mobile broadband, is there a SIM card slot for AT&T?
Thanks
- How does it compare to the series 9?

 

major problem... no, minor yes at least for me. here is my list
- track pad is really bad. lack of physical button is minus. also track pad should be center at the space bar not center of the machine. since trackpad is one giant sensitive pad so i cannot leave my finger on left or right click area and do all the thing ie. scrolling.
- small right shift key is really annoying a lot of miss type from pressing arrow instead of shift give me a huge headache combine with the awkward hand position to avoid the trackpad. (shallow key is not a big deal as long as i can type)
- speaker as we know but headphone fix the problem
- lack of open GL 2 & 3 in driver set that has been provide by sony is bad.
- locked WWAN only to sprint and ATT and yes you can insert you own SIM, although it came with ATT sim in it

* i haven't played with the PMD yet but will do and report back

 

damn, the trackpad and speakers really changed my decision about this laptop :/

Thanks for the detailed response

 

- I find the trackpad ok...worse than the older Z's but I think it will be more resistant to that shine after long period of usage. After getting use to it...it's ok. I usually use an external bluetooth mouse.
- The speakers are tiny and distort at high volume...turning off Dolby improves it by alot.
- I don't really like the keyboard...maybe it's just mine...but some of the keys seem to squeak (but only if you listen closely for it you can notice it).

 

Yeah I definitely think he has a defective unit, you should be able to wake the computer with any keyboard press when it's in sleep anyway, and he's obviously hammering the keyboard and it's not waking. The power button is quite solid on the Z21 (I assume to prevent accidently powering on the machine in a bag if you have it fully shut down).

I'm still wondering why there's no option for the laptop to automatically wake from sleep when the lid is opened. Is it that VAIO Support found that a large number of laptops were being damaged from accidently powering on when inside a bag? Does this also explain the stiff Power button?

 

I just received my new Z21 this week end !

I love it except for one thing (and i don't know if its normal or not) :

Internet Explorer 9 is really slow when on battery (compared with power cable). I changed all the settings on performance... but it's still really slow !
Of course when I plug the power cord back in then it gets fast again !

Any idea ???? Thanks
And by the way the Z21 is super quiet on office and web surfing (can't hear anything ;-)

 

In the IE Advanced options, the first option should be an option to use Software rendering instead of GPU rendering. That should resolve it.

 

This is good for fast browsing, yes. But i think the main problem is the bad intel driver on devices with PMD. I´ve posted this already a few pages above

 

thanks but it doesn't seem to change anything .. unless i need to reboot the Z ?
any other ideas

I don't have PMD.

 

It was me that had the 80% issue. I still have a case open with Sony and it has now been escalated. For me the internal battery never changes to "fully charged" so it will never charge the external battery to 100%.

I cant say I am that impressed with Sony Support :-

• 3 days to make first contact with me

• Their fix by email was to disable Vaio Battery Care even though I had provided screen shots of it being disabled and put in the case notes that the internal battery charges beyond 80% so battery care can't be enabled.

• Been told to remove the internal battery and power on with just the external battery and disable Vaio Care. Interesting - but the external battery is not detected if the internal battery is removed.....

• 
  Get an email quoting the manual and the order that the batteries charge in. Has absolutely no relevance to the case.

I am unclear if it is a hardware issue or faulty battery. When charging the internal battery sometimes it charges to 100%, quite often it stops at 90 or 91%. It will remain in a status of charging but even after 24 hours will increase no further. After spending $4000 on a laptop and reporting the issue in under 7 days I expected a better and quicker response.....

 

How the physical layout of the keys differs between different localized keyboards?

The cto z21 does not include configuration for Finnish keyboard, so can I just add a sticker for missing keys (if the physical layout is the same)?

 

I had the problem too before. What I did was simply undock the sheet, and charge it externally, using the adapter, to 100% (wait until the light goes off). And I also charged the notebook alone to 100%. When I put both together again, the battery was at a real 100% for the first time, and from then on, I never had the 80%-problem again.

I have the German QWERTZ layout and it just like any normal German keyboard layout. The arrow keys are pushed into it, making the right shift key a lot smaller, and the keys on the bottom row all are smaller than usual as well. At the top there are the "Insert" and "Delete" key (above backspace, which has a good size itself), and "Home", "End", "Page up" and "Page down" are added as function keys on the arrow keys - another "Fn" key sits directly to the right of the "Up" key. Apart from that, everything is normal.

 

I have a love/hate relationship with the touchpad on the Z. It works much better than Alps touchpads which are just horrible. My biggest problem is that it's just too small. I did find a way to make it behave like a larger pad. I removed the factory touchpad drivers and installed the latest from Synaptics. It has more gesture options and best of all it extends the mousing area to the entire pad. So before if I was scrolling or mousing and reached the button area the cursor would stop. Now I can go all the way to the physical bottom of the pad. The buttons still function just as before. I find the touchpad much more usable now.

As far as the keyboard is concerned it's passable. I hate the shallow key press and the 3/4 size period key is extremely annoying. I sometimes find that I miss a character while typing because I don't have any feedback from the keys since the motion is so shallow.

Drivers | Synaptics

 

I wonder if you are able to do a right-click and drag with those drivers?

 

Yes those work. You can also two finger click (anywhere on the pad) for a right click (contextual menu). I found no negatives going to the Synaptics driver.

 

LTE option is now available in Japan for CTO orders. During the promotion period, the option is free when upgrading from 3G/WWAN option (which itself is a 15,000yen upgrade option). When you open a new LTE subscription, you also get 35,000yen cash back, which should help offset the current high price of LTE over a 2 year contract.

Japan CTO orders now (including the LTE option) will be delivered around September 20.

There is no indication if the LTE module will be locked to Japan's Docomo Xi LTE network, and also no indication when/if LTE modules will be available for Z2 in other markets following Japan.

 

Thank you for your driver tipp! Installed it on my european vaio z21 after deinstallation of the stock driver. Date is older but driver is better i think

Good for me are the video clips in the driver showing how to use it´s features

 

Hi Bill,

Found out the exact same thing today. It's all internet not just IE - Chrome does the same thing. I did two things which instantly fixed it - not sure which is responsible. I went into the Power settings and under the Advanced options for the plan, switch the wireless adapter power options to Maximum performance, as well as switching the Javascript IE option to max performance.

That fixed it (although I had to put the Z2 to sleep and wake for the setting to take effect).

It was super annoying how slow the browsing was before this change.

Yeang

 

Yes, the new driver is awesome. Thanks again for the tip!

For those of you with issues with 1080p - I bought the Z2 specifically for 1080p but then when I switched everything down to 100% instead of 125% I found that the text on dialog boxes and window titles was almost unreadable - it looks like Sony actually did some custom settings to make those particular items smaller so that they wouldn't look too huge at 125%.

After I did a clean reinstall of win7 ultimate - the comp looks perfect as a true 1080p screen should look. Everything is small but sharp and crisp! loving it.
Only gripe is that it's not a IPS screen - I've been using only IPS screens for the last 5 years so am quite spoiled by the great view angle and lack of shimmer, which I notice on time to time with this screen.

So for those of you with 1080p issues - try a clean install and see how different things look after Sony's stupid settings are cleared out. I'm not sure how to restore the standard font sizes, aside from setting the text size to 100% - there is more to Sony's settings than that.

Yeang

 

ABOUT OPENGL:

using Intel drivers provided by SONY, Open GL works perfectly for me:

http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/2892/imagefi.png

I checked this after a complete windows update which resolved battery, Bluetooth and smart network problems.

 

Yes, i think you are not using a PMD, right? In this case you can use the intel default driver which is perfectly working with all open gl versions...

 

Yeah but what I'm saying is that EVEN driver provided by SONY works perfectly.
At least without PMD.

The image above is with intel driver by SONY, not Intel.

 

Sorry, but there must be a difference between the drivers. As you can see in my screenshot my chip is identified as "GDI generic" - yours is different.

On my system there is no newer driver through windows update.

Here is all of the log given by the open gl extension viewer:

Renderer: GDI Generic
Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
Memory: 3861 MB
Version: 1.1.0
Shading language version: N/A


Max texture size: 1024 x 1024
Max texture coordinates: 0
Max vertex texture image units: 0
Max texture image units: 0
Max geometry texture units: 0
Max anisotropic filtering value: 0
Max number of light sources: 8
Max viewport size: 16384 x 16384
Max uniform vertex components: 0
Max uniform fragment components: 0
Max geometry uniform components: 0
Max varying floats: 0
Max samples: 0
Max draw buffers: 0


Extensions: 3

GL_EXT_bgra
GL_EXT_paletted_texture
GL_WIN_swap_hint

Core features
v1.1 (100 % - 7/7)
v1.2 (0 % - 0/6)
v1.3 (0 % - 0/9)
v1.4 (0 % - 0/14)
v1.5 (0 % - 0/3)
v2.0 (0 % - 0/10)
v2.1 (0 % - 0/3)
v3.0 (0 % - 0/23)
v3.1 (0 % - 0/7)
v3.2 (0 % - 0/10)
v3.3 (0 % - 0/9)
v4.0 (0 % - 0/13)
v4.1 (0 % - 0/5)
v4.2 (0 % - 0/12)

OpenGL driver version check (Current: 1.1.0, Latest known: 8.830.7.0):
Outdated version of display drivers detected
According the database, you are might be not using the latest version of display drivers for your video card.

No ICD registry entry
The current OpenGL driver doesn't expose the SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows (NT)/CurrentVersion/OpenGLDrivers registry entry. Unable to detect the driver version, driver revision name and filename.

No compiled vertex array support
This may cause performance loss in some applications.

No multitexturing support
This may cause performance loss in some applications.

No secondary color support
Some applications may not render polygon highlights correctly.

No S3TC compression support
This may cause performance loss in some applications.

No texture edge clamp support
This feature adds clamping control to edge texel filtering. Some programs may not render textures correctly (black line on borders.)

No vertex program support
This feature enables vertex programming (equivalent to DX8 Vertex Shader.) Some current or future OpenGL programs may require this feature.

No fragment program support
This feature enables per pixel programming (equivalent to DX9 Pixel Shader.) Some current or future OpenGL programs may require this feature.

No OpenGL Shading Language support
This may break compatibility for applications using per pixel shading.

No Frame buffer object support
This may break compatibility for applications using render to texture functions.

Few texture units found
This may slow down some applications using fragment programs or extensive texture mapping.

Extension verification:
GL_EXT_color_subtable was not found, but has the entry point glColorSubTableEXT
GL_EXT_gpu_shader4 was not found, but has the entry point glColorSubTableEXT
GL_EXT_paletted_texture has the entry point glDrawArraysInstancedEXT missing!
GL_EXT_paletted_texture has the entry point glDrawElementsInstancedEXT missing!
GL_EXT_texture_compression_rgtc was not found, but has the entry point glColorTableEXT
GL_EXT_texture_compression_rgtc was not found, but has the entry point glGetColorTableEXT
GL_EXT_texture_compression_rgtc was not found, but has the entry point glGetColorTableParameterfvEXT
GL_EXT_texture_compression_rgtc was not found, but has the entry point glGetColorTableParameterivEXT
GL_WIN_swap_hint has the entry point glClearDepthfOES missing!
GL_WIN_swap_hint has the entry point glClipPlanefOES missing!
GL_WIN_swap_hint has the entry point glDepthRangefOES missing!
GL_WIN_swap_hint has the entry point glFrustumfOES missing!
GL_WIN_swap_hint has the entry point glGetClipPlanefOES missing!
GL_WIN_swap_hint has the entry point glOrthofOES missing!
GL_EXT_draw_buffers2 was not found, but is available in driver version 1.1.0
GL_EXT_texture_compression_rgtc was not found, but is available in driver version 1.1.0

 

Exactly that’s the point. If you have the PMD, you install the ATI graphics driver that includes a driver for the internal Intel GPU as well. If you do not have the PMD, you just use the Intel driver (which is the original Intel driver).

However the driver for the internal GPU that is integrated in the ATI driver is not good enough to have full OpenGL support.

 

BTW: Is it possible to use the Protection Suite from the old z´s? Anyone tried this?

 

Possibly, from what I understand, Sony did away with this in their SA-BCD Series as well. However, someone in the SABCD Owners Thread was able to find a solution to allow their SA to wake when lid is opened. Did not continue on reading that thread, since my cousin, returned his SA.

If your interested in this, I'd drop in over at that thread and post the question and see if his solution works on your Z2. Let us know the outcome.