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

So guys, I haven't bothered to look through the thread in its entirety (COME ON NBR, EVERY SINGLE OTHER FRICKEN VBULLETIN BOARD I VISIT HAS A WORKING SEARCH) but has anyone found a workaround for the b0rked HD3000 driver? It's about to become a serious point of annoyance for me as I'd actually banked on being able to use the HD3000 to it's normal abilities.

Probably a scissor mechanism issue. I'd warranty it.

 

^ "S" key is also fine at every corner, center and sides.

 

That was kind of like my enter key, but I took it off, cleaned it a bit, and put it back on and it was fixed.

 

This is probably the thread you want to follow. A lot of bright guys are involved here.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/611372-vaio-z2-pmd-driver-testing-investigation.html

 

Thanks for all of your quick replies. Is there anything I can do myself to fix it? I've tried taking it off many time and cleaning it with compressed air. I don't really feel like sending it to sony.

If i do get sony to do it for me, how long is it going to take? Im not sure if it bothers me enough to lose my computer for a long time.

 

I would look carefully around for any other issues, however minor, and have them all addressed at once. If you want to deal with it yourself it's up to you, but personally I don't bother. (Mind you, I buy multiple machines so that I can have one - or more, in the case of Apples - in the shop without impact on my usage).

While not as bad as the TT's, I've already had one panel fit issue with a Z2, so e.g. that went back to be replaced. I'm also considering making the HD3000 driver issue a problem for Sony to deal with, but I suspect my only realistic ultimate recourse for that would be to return all the machines for a refund of some sort, so am trying to figure out what my backup would be in this case. I might get a couple of the new Toshibas as a hedge, then hit Sony Support all at once.

 

Is anyone else having problems with the speakers not turning off when you plug in headphones? The only headphones that I've found to successfully turn of the speakers when plugged in are the included Sony noise-cancelling headphones. All my other headphones leave the speakers turned on. I've tried unplugging and replugging them, and I've tried a few different sets of headphones, all with the same results.

 

Was looking at the German CTO by chance today again; anyone still thinking about buying a Z2 should get it now. The i7 is currently available as a free upgrade.

And apparently they added the engraving service now too. Too bad I missed that one

It works fine for me.

On the topic of headphones, I’ll ask this again: Did anyone manage to get an external microphone working with the connector, or is it really just output?

 

No problems here too. I can unplug the headphones and it switches over just fine to the pathetic speakers

On a related note, when is a Z2 lighter than an 11-inch Air?

Answer: In an actually useful config

 

^ That’s awesome xD

 

Can someone check which driver is installed for their monitor in device manager? I'm looking for which driver is installed for a factory install and clean install.

 

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

 

Looks like the SA/B/C owners got update drivers. Are these updated from your versions?

http://www.sony-asia.com/support/product/vpcz217gh

Z2 will be here tomorrow.

 

Digital Flat Panel (1920x1080 60Hz) - from Microsoft, 21.6.2006, version 6.1.7600.16385

 

A quick note on how I am getting on with my Vaio Z (VPCZ21C5E).

8GB RAM
i7
500GB SSD3
1920x1080
PMD BD
Windows 7 Ulitmate
Office + Acrobat

I use the Z primarily for software development, electronic schematic capture and PCB layout, and systems integration testing, which means running plenty of VMWare guests simultaneously. My last machine was a 1920x1200 15" Dell D820 T7200 dual core, 4GB RAM/500GB 7200RPM SATA + 320GB 5400 RPM PATA and was 4.5 years old. I used the two disks to speed up running multiple VMware guests.

I chose the Z almost solely on the fact that it's the smallest 1920x1080 resolution screen available. The high resolution is essential for CAD and also it's extremely desirable for software development. Had there still been 1920x1200 15" laptops to be had I would have probably gone that way again, but they all seem to be x1080 these days which makes a wider footprint for the same 15" diagonal measurement due to the squashed aspect ratio.

On the Z, switching to SSD for VMWare has to be seen to be believed. Booting VMs in a few seconds makes for a massive increase in productivity.

Booting the machine itself is mighty impressive: I used to standby my old Dell as it always took a couple of minutes to boot (didn't Bill Gates slag off OS/2 once for exactly that...?) . The Z boots in a few seconds, the only exception being that the 3G WWAN app is a bit slow to interogate the modem.

t+0s Switch on
t+4s Bios finished, start Windows
t+15s Windows logon screen, finger swipe to logon
t+20s Windows desktop open
t+23s Systray loaded, ready to roll

When I first received the unit back in August, I had some problems with some of the Vaio updates installing, where the update app would go round in circles downloading but failiing to install. This seems to have resolved itself.

The touch pad is fine for my purposes, I don't particularly have a complaint about its size.

Equally I find the 1920x1080 display to be perfectly acceptable. Although I've been used to 15" 1920x1200 for some years now, the 13" 1920x1080 is now getting to the limit of comfort for me doing development and CAD.

My only wish at this stage would be for more USB 3 ports on the laptop iteself: I'm not clear why there is one USB 2 and one USB 3 either, why not both USB 3?

I have found that I hardly ever use the PMD: indeed the only time I can remember using it was to make back up DVDs and to rip a BD to see how well that worked - my poor old 4.5 year old Dell would not play BDs unless they were MPEG2 - H.264 or VC-1 just required too much processing/GPU power to play without heavy stuttering. For my day to day purposes, there was really little point in having it: I don't play games so the external GPU adds no value for me.

In daily use I do run an additional external 512GB 2.5" external USB3 SSD for all those VMs, and as often as not there's a 1.5TB 2.5" USB2 hard drive hooked up that I use for backup and archive purposes.

Probably because of the case I purchased for the Vaio (a vgp-ckz3), I don't use the additional battery "slate", as it doesn't fit in the case with it fitted. I find the claimed battery life is rather inflated: in normal use I'd say I get about 3 or 4 hours out of it.

In précis, it was with a sharp intake of breath that I blew a fat wedge on this laptop, and it took some long and hard thinking to convince myself I was doing the right thing. The result is that I have a way lighter laptop than my poor old Dell, with stunning speed mainly due to the SSD, and I am much more productive as a result. Most upgrades of technology are incremental:the last time I made such a large step was when I switched from CRTs to LCDs on my desk ten or so years ago, and suddenly I had much more desk real estate. Moving to SSD has been at least as large a step. Face it, within five years you won't be able to buy a laptop without SSD, just like you can't buy MP3 players with hard disks anymore, or indeed CRTs.

Cheers, Howard

 

Interesting...Is this from a factory install?

 

The link isn´t working for me. What do you mean with updated drivers? Newer date?

 

Mine is also like Palda's.
Mine is from factory install.

 

factory install

 

It’s a bit annoying that they say that all installed drivers are available on the website, but then there seem to be so many things missing compared to factory install…

 

The eagle-eyed may notice I even included a MicroSD converter card in there, and a SIM is installed

 

They declare that every driver which is to make your laptop working, is online. And in addition a PART of utility... but not all utility (I read something about it in manuals i think)

 

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Howard. Definitely too bad that the battery doesn't last longer, but it has come to be expected that those estimates are severely inflated.

 

Z2 delvered today! 512 GEN 3 SSD. It would have gone back without that. I will be updating my Z gaming thread with direct comparisons between that of the Z2 and the Bios hacked Z1.

I already know the results, but for those that have connections with Sony, perhaps you can share this info with them.

 

Hello,

This computer has Win 7 HP and I would like to upgrade it to Pro or Ultimate. Since the Z2 has a TPM chip that would work with bitlocker, does anyone think that ultimate is worth the coin? Is bitlocker even a good program?

Win 7 Pro $29

Win 7 Ultimate $80

Appreciate the inpunt in advance!

 

sorry if covered, but can someone help me out? I just ordered a sony z2 and cannot wait to start buying accessories!

Do SD cards when inserted stick out or is it flush. Same question with memory stick. Can I use the SD card and Memory stick at the same time or does it only do one or the other? These two things may increase memory substantially, but i would only do it if it was flush. thanks!!

 

Ultimate is cool, I've never used BitLocker. I'm not sure Ultimate is worth the $80 upgrade, but I've never used Home Premium. I've only ever used Pro and Ult and they both did everything I needed them to do. Of course now I am hooked on 8 Alpha, even though it has issues, there are new features that I can't live without.

 

I just tried this out and both types of cards work simultaneously.

The SD card sticks out from the mounting surface about 1/8" and the memory stick about 1/16".

Note, however, that because the front edge is beveled downwards, the SD card barely extends past the top (i.e. leadeing) edge of the palm rest and the memory card is pretty much flush with it.

 

That sucks... On mine, the small strip below the magic gate slot bends outwards while the strip under the SD slot bends inwards... Not sure how it happened.

 

I have an SD card and MSDuo card in both slots almost the entire time, you never notice them. Also helps if you can find black-coloured cards so they won't stand out so much.

The SD slot has great potential for expansion as it supports SDHC all the way up to 128GB at the moment. I have a cheapy 32GB SDHC card in there and although it's only rated Class 4 the read speeds are good (plenty for playing HD video etc), except the write speed maxes out at about 7MB/sec. But it means the SD slot is perfect for archiving video and the like.

 

I'm trying to find the digital flat panel driver for 1600x900 but I can't. I've seen the one for 1920x1080. I think this is the cause of my color profile not being automatically loaded everytime I come out of sleep or restart....

Anyone have the driver for the 1600x900 monitor from a factory install?

 

Is anyone else getting a jumpy cursor when using the touchpad? I'm use to keeping a finger on the touchpad button while using the touchpad but this causes all kinds of issues and it's really annoying. I feel like I have to use the touchpad like an old man for it to respond correctly.

 

Are you using the Sony driver? If you're not, other drivers that I've tried including the one from the Synaptics website make the entire trackpad including the buttons touch sensitive. This is what causes the jumpiness when you keep one finger on the touchpad button.

 

I found out today that Win7Pro does not support VHD boot but Ultimate does.
Windows 7 ? VHD Boot ? Setup Guideline - knom's developer corner - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

 

I've tried all drivers and I still get the jumpiness. I'm currently using the drivers that just came up on VAIO Update. Seems like Sony is aware of the issues with the trackpad. It still doesn't seem smooth though...

 

You could try the drives available directly from Synaptics, but I'm not sure it'll make a difference. Almost sounds like a video problem.

DO you get stuttering on both GPU's? How does scrolling work in web browsers? Is there anything pegging the CPU? Did the issue just start one day?

 

Hi, all, this thread is awesome but a bit massive

I'm an existing X owner and finally jumped to the Z. Order placed yesterday with ship date so far 10-11

Component: Black
Component: Fresh Start
Component: Intel® Core™ i5-2540M processor (2.60GHz) with Turbo Boost up to 3.30GHz
Component: 8GB (4GB x2 fixed onboard) DDR3-SDRAM-1333
Component: Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit
Component: Power Media Dock™ with AMD Radeon™ HD 6650M (1GB) graphics and CD/DVD player / burner
Component: 13.1" LED backlit Full HD display (1920 x 1080)
Component: 128GB (64GB x2) solid state drive with RAID 0
Total Price: $2,229.99

I'm a resolution/display w-hore so 1920x1080 on a notebook is irresistible )

Decided on i5 and instead load it up with 8GB of memory. The drives are a bit small but my storage is on my file server and NAS at home, no need to carry around massive amounts of bits

I love the X but the screen is a little bit small, hate the low vertical resolution as one has to contently scroll all the time. Also the 2GB was showing its limits all the time. I use this thing primarily for development so most of the time its quite loaded in terms of applications. We are taking Outlook (Thunderbuird fails for me with large number of emails), at least 2-3 browser instances with maybe average 20 tabs total, Eclipse (dev IDE) with a bunch of plugins, Webserver, Java server, ColdFusion server, mySQL server, sometimes Microsoft SQL server, Navicat SQL IDE or Toad, sometimes Photoshop, and other stuff like FTP client, SSH client etc... So the machine is quite loaded all the time. Starting a couple of VM instances was just killing the poor X. Hopefully the new Z will be able to handle this much better On top of that the native support for more then one external display is awesome. Now when in the home office I have to use one 24" LCD via the VGA port and another 24" LCD via external USB video card and thats not quite user friendly performance wise. Can't wait to get the new toy

 

I can't believe you did all that with the X, I have a first and second gen P which are basically the same specs as the X and they are only usefull for web browsing IMHO. The new Z will be like 50 times as fast, I'm not exaggerating at all.

 

I love the Sony X, its so impossibly light - just kinda slow. If only Sony was able to make the Z2 1.6 pounds...

 

I do that all the time, are you series about only web browsing? I am running XP on it, now I have IIS webserver, Coldfusion server, Jrun Java server, mySQL server, SQL server, access, 3 word docs, two instances of FF with total of 15 tabs, 1 IE instance, 1 PDF doc, Outlook 2010, Microsoft SQL management studio, Pidgin, Eclipse IDE with a bunch of plugins, couple excel spread sheets, and some TaxtPad dox open. Yes the OS is optimized quite well and I run like this or more apps all the time. Memory utilization is around 2.5GB so lots of disk swapping but with the quick drive its not bad. System uptime 14 days, 6 hours 13 min I do not reboot much as its too much of a pain with all the apps running. Its quite quick, no issues performance wise.

 

True, its an awesome machine for what it is. The size is great, and 1.6lb I do run the extended battery now (L) so it adds to bulk and the weight. Still very compact. Not sure why they discontinued this great notebook but one of the issues was that NO ONE knew it existed. None of the stores sold it. Sad but quite typical with Sony as a company.

 

yes I am serious, I only use them for web browsing, I have 7 not XP, I actually put windows 8 on one of them. Maybe they'd run a little faster with XP... but then I'd have to use XP. The ATOM is great on power but poor on performance. My UX is way faster with the Core2Duo mod.

If you think the X has remotely acceptable performance you are going to be blown away by the Z2, it is like desktop replacement performance in an ultraportable form factor.

 

I guess it depends on what the expectations are, for me even with all these apps running, the performance is quite good, no issues at all other then the FF having issues with Flash plugin where the CPU spikes up in some situations.

 

^
The Z2 will probably blow you away with its performance. When I web browse on anything with an atom processor (I think the pentium m inside my old dell latitude d800 was faster), I kind of want to throw it against a wall; but at least the X has a very nice screen. Guess the Z spoils you...

 

I agree. A Netbook it is not.

However, I'd call it a workstation replacement, not a desktop replacement. The difference being that the Z2's gaming performance isn't good enough to compare to even a mid-level desktop.

I like my Z2, but I'll be playing BF3 and Aliens: Colonial Marines on my big machine.

That said, compilations in Visual Studio are plenty fast and I'm pleased with VMWare performance. Performance of the CPU and SSD's ain't no joke.

 

Gold Z22 with i7-2640m is available for preorder at the Sony US site.

 

Well if you are having trouble browsing the web with a comp running Antom processor then there is definitely something wrong with the OS and loaded with crap and malware. My X with all the stuff running I listed in my previous thread shows no deference while browsing web comparing to my i5 Lenovo from work. Browsing web is not dependent on a CPU but limited by your internet connection and crap loaded up in the browser. There is nothing special or taxing on modern computer when browsing web. I just cleaned a neighbors older XP desktop. It was at least 5 years old and I did not check what CPU it had. The thing was crawling still. Opening up something like ebay was taking forever. But they also had like 20 toolbars loaded and a bunch of other crap running including a bunch of malware as well as a heavy fragmented hard drive. After couple hours of clenup the machine was flying. Websites loading very fast, as fast as they would on any i5 or i7 machine.

Any Antom when running a properly configured and clean OS will be more then adequate for most of the today average user. The problem I have with it is that my use is far beyond a typical use so Antom is showing its limits. Now specifically with the X the 2GB of RAM is the greatest limit for me. I max it out very fast with my regular daily load. Thats the reason I ordered the Z with 8GB. I can run couple VMs with 2GB each and still have 4GB left for the host OS.

* I'm not referring here to people playing games or doing stuff like video editing HD content. For that I agree that Antom CPU is a bit locking but not for normal web/office use.

 

The support page is up for this model also. Alas, no new video drivers listed.

 

Don't install the Z22 stuff yet.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/615175-trying-new-z22-drivers-z21.html#post7960933

 

^
ZoniksS2k...say...is it hard to take off the bottom cover of the Z2 or is it pretty straight forward? TIA!