Official Sony Vaio CW Core 2 Duo Series Owner's Thread

I have no problem with WEB. Just several questions (like a select language and time zone) at the beginning of first initialization.

 

I hope BLACK FRIDAY itself has a better deal than this. Im holding back til' then to make a purchase from sony.com. Otherwise I'd get it now and have a Christmas present to myself early

 

^^ this sales is a hogwash ! Off topic but you can get a DCR SR47 Camcorder for $308 shipped with tax from Abe's of Maine, rather than buy it as Black friday sale for $299 + tax

Leads me to believe the laptop sale is also hogwash !

 

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/

Check both the 19x and 18x and play around with them till you get a driver that you feel works best for you.

1. The screen is based on preference. Those of us who have been spoiled by extremely nice screens with rich and vibrant colors will be disappointed by the CW screen. I personally don't like it too much but it's not abysmal - I can live.

2. The speakers are pretty standard for a laptop. They are not horrid by any means. Sure they don't have any bass and they don't go that loud but it's a 14" laptop, what do you expect? I have no complaints about them.

3. It seems the Atheros card only comes in the Best Buy models. I ordered a CTO CW from Sony Style and got an Intel 5100.

4. Not sure what you mean about battery drain but I'm assuming it's the inaccurate measurement of the battery life indicator. Right now, I've only been using the laptop for about 30 minutes and I'm already at 78% with only 2 hrs and 5 minutes remaining in balanced mode. However, this is NOT an accurate gauge for battery life. I've consistently gone up to 3-4 hours on the battery.

Hope that helps.

 

Thats really really odd, as this is not suppose to happen, it must be your unit. Unless, you did a clean install or reinstalled your hard drive or maybe changed your hard drive. its suppose to work right out the box. where did you buy yours from?

 

oh thats good . I went to see for myself today but not Comet, Currys or PC world had them on the shelf seems only the sony centre has... is it comparable in size and thickness to the sony vaio cs? i seen that in-store and it's fairly slim looking

 

About LCD, it is reasonably bright and very crisp. However, viewing angle and black level are rather poor. It is not a "bad" LCD - it is just not as good as that of SR or dual-lamp FW.

I have to say I love the ergonomic, though. Solid keyboard, slight tilt and elevated&rounded palmrest do wonders for a prolonged typing. Otherwise, I'd say CW is a very good "jack-of-all-trade" of a laptop. It doesn't particular stand out on anything, but it is a solid all-rounder. Had I got more time, I'd do a mini-review, but I cannot.

I haven't compared them side to side, but I'd say CW looks more sleek than CS. It really is a beautiful laptop.

 

Just got mine in the mail today, so far I'm pretty pleased.

The screen is just mediocre at best, black levels and viewing angles are indeed poor, but not something I don't think I can live with (I'll try gaming this weekend and give it a proper test).

Part of it is the color profile it defaults too is horrid, I was much happier once I enabled color management in the nvidia control panel, which was oddly turned off when I rebooted, one of the vaio default apps kept resetting the color profile. Once you fix that, the display no longer looks so washed out.

 

Very nice thread going here, helped answer alot of questions I had.

Got my Sony VPCCW14FX yestarday, purchased from Newegg.

The model I have has the Atheros wireless adapter.

The battery does wiggle alittle but it seems inherent
in how the battery fits into the laptop. I don't believe it is a problem but it may annoy some.

The right hand side of the laptop around DVD drive, is abit squishy on the top and bottom.
This is common on the other notebooks I have played with in this size (Dell, Toshiba, HP), but it is more noticable on the CW.

The build quality seems ok.

I find the screen to be fine, but the viewing angels are narrow.

The laptop does run pretty cool and quiet.


My CW had a problem where a couple of the keys "s" and "d"
intermittantely doubled the letter with a single depress.

For example a single push of the "d" key produces "dd"

In an effort to not have to go through the hassle of a RMA process which in all likely hood
would get me no where, I decided to look for a solution on my own.

I found it in a different post on this site, which refered to a different site forum.
This has solved my problem and I thought I would post it below for anyone else that is unlucky.


The instructions are for XP, but it is only slightly different in Window 7
---------

Link to forum post
----------

Overall I am happy with the CW for the price, and as long as the CW holds up over time I will stay that way.

 

Wondering if anyone can enligten me regarding the graphics card for gaming. If anyone plays The Sims 3, how is it on the G 230M?

I have tried looking for more info on the card but my search results ends up with only the GT 230M.

May sound like noob, but with the VPCCW16FA it should play pretty well with Sims 3 right? Anyone with experience?

Thanks in advance!

 

wow thats good news if possible, could you take a screen shot or note down which options you changed to what so we can get a clear image on what to change to get a better picture

 

For those of you who have made purchases via Sony.com, have you added the protection plans to your order. I always get them and sometimes they are worth it, sometimes not.

 

hi people,

i'm iteresting to this note for my brother...

i want to hnow some details from the owners;

1) power suply is it 90Watt?
2) max temperature of the gpu and cpu in intensive application like games(you an register it with gpuz v3.7 before launch the game)
3) i need a screen shoot of the gpuz and of the cpu and chipset with cpu z
4) is possible to a photo of the heatsink system of the notebook , i wabt to know the efficency of thisheat dissipation system.
5) i have an 16" notebook with 1366 x768 and it is also an HD display when i play an HD video at 720i , is this display an HD so? the display is with LED technology?

Thanks

 

I've had my CW Indigo (GT230m, 320Gb HD, 4Gb RAM, no blu-ray ) for almost a week now, I'm pretty impressed and satisfied with it.

The only thing that I missed from my white MacBook were the multi touch gestures (two finger scrolling, two finger tapping for right click, three-finger flicks etc).

After some experimentation, and knowing that the trackpad is a Synaptics -just like Macs and most of the other serious brands out there-, I've found a method to enable these gestures, and I thought many of you might be interested in it.

It's very simple: you need to add/modify two registry entries and then run an -open source- program.

First, the registry entries:
Using regedit, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\SynTP\Parameters
and create a DWORD (32-bit) value named CapabilitiesMask. After creating it, double click on it and put FFFFFFFF as value. If the value was already created, just modify it to be FFFFFFFF.

Then, still using regedit, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPCpl
and create a DWORD (32-bit) value named DisplayGestures, and put a value of 1 to it.

Reboot (very important step!!).

Now go to http://code.google.com/p/two-finger-scroll/ , and download the latest version of the app (at this moment, it's 1.0.6). Launch it, and you should now have a finger icon in the status area, right click on it and you'll be able to set your preferences.

Enjoy!

 

Anyone know where I can get a car adapter for this laptop? didn't see it in the Sony store.

 

thanks for the reassurance may i ask what colour you have? i really can't wait now

 

Just wondering if any of you guys have been doing some tweaking on the CW yet to improve battery lie? performace/? graphicss, etc?

writeups would be cool!

 

Quote:
Originally Posted by emersite
Has anyone tried the "WEB" button (near the Display Off one) when the CW is turned off? The CW is supposed to launch a Linux based environment just with a browser for quick web access.

I just tried on mine and I received a message saying that I do not have Splashtop installed. Does that happen to everybody or am I the only one that got a unit with this issue?

Thanks!

I got mine at sonystyle.com. P8700, 500Gb, GT 230, Blu-R. I called technical support and they made me restore to factory settings. Though "Web" is now working, I am pretty unhappy with what happened since I had done nothing other than uninstall Norton and Office and install Microsoft Security Essentials.

In addition, my battery seems to last only 2.5 hours (only web browsing). I am still doing some tests, but indeed it looks like the battery is draining while the laptop is completely turned off.

I will probably return it.

 

charged the battery to 100% and shut it down. after 3 days the charge was down to 66%

 

Hmmm that is indeed quite annoying. Can things like battery drain be fixed with a bios update or is it something that can't be fixed?

My current laptop loses like 15% of charge if its been left for around 6 or 7 days, but i think that's due to the laptop having a touch sensitive button that can turn the laptop on, or could just be the battery getting old... not sure

I think it's only a minor issue, although i suppose it does limit people who travel alot. i tend to use laptops on the mains power all the time anyway so it doesnt really bother me that much.

unrelated - does using a laptop on the mains all the time damage the battery? i got told this off someone but dunno whether he's right or not.

I think once i recieve my CW i might do a mini review i have yet to find a bloody good review for the CW. C'MON NOTEBOOKREVIEW.COM

 

My CW will arrive on Monday, and it will be my first laptop purchase. I took advantage of the $100 off at J&R, but $800 is still quite a lot for me to spend. That said, I've felt an overwhelming sadness reading these negative post's the last couple of days. I really don't want to be in that mindset come Monday. Please, those that currently have the CW, say something nice about it.

Thank You all.

 

Hi, I have read this forum for a long but, I never joined cause every problem solved by just reading...
But now I 'v faced a problem...
First let me say: I own CW 18FX for about a week... P7450, GT230M, WIN7-64,…
everything was quite well, playing HD/Full HD movies, PES10,NFS SHIFT...RUN VERY WELL
I have checked my CPU AND GPU with latest version of cpuz and gpuz :
in idle state the cpu clock down to 1.5GHZ and GPU CORE CLOCK AND MEM.CLOCK goes on 135Mhz quite well...
but now today when upgrade my GPU-Z to latest version and check it again I found this when my computer doesn’t do any graphical process!!!Shocked!!


What I have done:
1.Change my power option to power saver...
2.Change my nvidia state to performance...
3.unistalling Cyberlink power DVD 9 cause I thought may be this use my gpu in background…
4.from task manager I quit many programs ,even explorer...but again my gpu clock stay at maximum level
5.using previous versin of gpu-z…it shows the same thing

...it is really annoying...cause it makes more heat and eat up battery life

Also I didn’t found any any powermizer program that nvidia say it use this, to mange battery life …
Now I’m downloading the latest driver…may this solve the problem…but I the question remains why beforehand there is no problem with gpu clock…but now without any changes This happen…
Any one knows how can I manage these setting in win 7?!!

 

My cleared payment and estimate was 24.11.09 to 01.12.09.


But I got an email today saying it has gone into production and will be dispatched between the 27.11.09 and 02.12.09.


Not a big difference. Still happy so long as it gets here for Christmas.

 

New review up:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/product-reviews/sony-vaio-cw-series-notebook-review/


It's more in depth than the CNet one. Nice photos too.

 

also I have the problem updating gpu driver by a downloaded setup file...
i heard this issu before but can't loacate it...any help?

 

I got the same email. Lets hope those dates are conservative

 

Both my emails had those dates, production email came this morning, I WANT IT NOW!!

 

im really sorry to hear that. maybe you can talk to tech support again, and say something around the lines of " I was getting 3-3.5 hrs battery but since i restored my laptops to original state as i was told my battery is draining alot. Are you making a note of the time or just reading off the battery meter ? the batter meter isnt accurate most times, i figured that out by looking at how much time was showing on my batter meter and how much i noted down my self and i noted a 30min-1hr increase then what the meter was showing on my current laptop(i dont have a CW) if its withing a months time since u purchased the laptop, then maybe they might replace your battery as most companies give 1month or 1 yr battery warranty. try to resolve whatever you can and at last resort i suggest returning the laptop just my 2 cents. maybe its just your laptop and you can get a replacement.

Well, most times yes things like battery drainage can be fixed via a bios update, lets just hope sony comes out with one soon.
to answer your unrelated question, ive been told by alot of people that it does sometimes ruin your computer, so they suggest that when your battery reaches 100% or near then just take off your plug and plug in your charger near the end i guess 20% or less, ive been doing this for over 2 years and my laptops runs fine, sometimes laptops are capable of running without the batter and others arent, if the CW does allow that and you keep your CW in one place for long periods of times or as a desktop replacement then i suggest taking out the battery and saving it for when on the move. But im not sure if CW is capable of running without battery, when pcs cant do that then they boot for a few secs then turn off.

 

The display model at Best Buy doesn't have the battery installed, just the AC adapter.

 

where can i dlownload updates to my gpu? cant seem to do so on the nvidia website

 

Is now a good time to buy the CW series? I'm still teetering on whether or not to pick mine up now or wait another month or so until after christmas. I'm a bit disappointed I missed the free blu-ray player deal as that wouldve dropped the price under 900 for me... Any upcoming sales? I am already taking advantage of the 7% student discount but that stacks with other promotions much of the time.

 

I'm waiting for my CW, but wanted to share my thoughts on some of the topics discussed in the forum.

Is it a good time to buy?: SonyStyle started a sale today, but it no longer comes with the free Blu-ray upgrade. If you didn't want/need a Blu-Ray drive, but wanted the other upgrades, you may be able to get better deal now.

Battery drain issue: For those that are suffering battery drain, in Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options\System Settings is it set to Shut Down rather than Hibernate or Sleep as to what happens when you hit the Power Button? Do you have Bios Versions R0190Y5 installed, which was supposed to correct the CPU fan issue some have complained about -- see http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VPCCW19FX&upd_id=5177&os_id=45 and http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VPCCW19GX&upd_id=5177&os_id=47. The links I posted may not be for your model so use at your own risk.

CPU Fan issue: As mentioned above, do you have Bios Version R0190Y5?

emad rajabi/Nvidia graphics driver: You can get the latest beta 195.55 driver from Nvidia's web site at http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_winvista_win7_195.55.html, which adds support for Flash 10.1 available at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/.

I'm eagerly awaiting my laptop. I'm hoping the battery issue is a non-issue. Beyond the convenience of not having to boot into Windows, I'm hoping the Web button provides some additional surfing time.

 

If anyone cares I have been using my CW from bestbuy to follow my fantasy football stats today. On a full charge with the power options in power saver its been going for 4.5 hours (actually +1 on brightness level, using wifi and a small amount of web surfing outside of fantasy stats) and still 10% left.

Pretty incredible if you ask me. Much better than I was hoping for.

Update: 4 hours and 42 minutes before it died.

 

silly me i forgot about display computers at shops since they are put without batteries, yeah so i suggest going that way, without battery so you can use your battery when you need to move around or on the move otherwise sitting at your desk or a place for more than a couple of hrs, i recommend it plus the VAIO charger isnt like some others where it pulls out easy, so even if you accidently tug on it a bit it wont come out.

as a user posted above you can try those links if not then that means that you have to wait for the driver uodates provided by Sony itself

 

Thats good news about the charger . I hate it when they fall out, and dells are notorious for that... it's as if they made the power port too big for the bloody charger jack...

btw is anyone willing to go into depth on the WEB button function... Is browsing the web the only thing you can do or is there other functionality... it would have been nice if they had included that linux with the XMB interface that is on the sony vaio p... that would have been really cool.

i can't wait . i really hope it ships tomorrow i dont see why it would take so long... unless they have run short on some parts... waiting kills me, im so impatient

 

I ordered mine on the 18th from sony style. It still says "In Process" does it usually take this long?

 

I'm having this problem too... every time I change settings in NVIDIA control panel it disables and goes back to default after waking or rebooting. Can you tell us how you fixed it?

Thanks in advance.

-- Tom

 

Yup I got exactly the same email as well. Looks like Sony must have sent another batch to production. Hope it arrives soon!

 

Asphaksad, can you tell me if you checked what VaioCWFan suggested below, is your system setting set to "Shut Down" or "Hibernate" or "Sleep"?

Has Anyone Else Checked that setting, what does it defaut too?

This is "very" important to me, as this might be the deciding factor in whether I purchase the CW or not.

 

Code:

dispatched between the 27.11.09 and 02.12.09.

Got exactly the same mail here too!
I'm from Italy
Ordered November, 15th

 

New Vaio CW Review posted today...it's a long one...9 pages...

Sony VAIO CW: An All-rounder
http://www.techtree.com/India/Reviews/Sony_VAIO_CW_An_All-rounder/551-107645-616.html

 

I can confirm it drains when completely shut down (not sleep, not hibernate, actual shut down) as I mentioned before.

Although, like some previous poster, I noticed it does take a long time for the % to go down when I have just started it up... So maybe the battery doesn't actually drain as badly as I think, it might be just windows thinking it did.

Anyway, I have been trying some different battery checking programs (Batterymon, Batterycare) and I'll let you guys know if I can find something (although the very extensive Batterymon doesn't seem to work properly with windows 7, which is a pity)

 

I guess worse case scenario is just pop out the battery if the CW is going to be sitting around for several days unplugged. Actually this issue is still not likely to stop me from purchasing the CW...if I was looking for "really" good battery life, I'd be looking elsewhere anyways...I want the POWER!!!!

 

Have you got RMClock installed? That has a really good battery meter that shows:
Battery designed capacity
Actual Maximum Battery capacity
Current capacity
Discharge rate in MAH

 

Dear CW owners,

Could you share impressions about Motion Eye web cam? The quality of image of my Motion is poor. Camera in my old Acer was much better......

 

What page had the instructions for making the recovery DVD? I can't seem to find it.

 

I have two questions for anyone that would like to answer. Mine is the Best Buy version.

1. I noticed that the power plug wiggles a little bit inside the jack. Does anyone else notice this as I've heard that some newer laptops give the jack some more wiggle room to prevent damage from accidents(tripping over cord).

2. Another minor annoyance is that the bottom left corner of the touchpad doesn't seem to be pushed down as far as the rest. The left mouse button also seems a little lower and it shows the corner is a little higher. Has anyone else seen this?

I have already had to return the first one I got. A few days after purchase I had a BSOD while surfing the internet. I have never had a bluescreen before on any other computer so this scared me. I ran a debugger and it said the failure was due to some video driver error. I figured I would let it go unless it happened again. A few days later I got another BSOD. This time however my computer refused to startup and let me look for problems. It would crash during startup or during the startup repair utility. After a day of trying to figure out what was wrong I took it back to best buy and exchanged it. I don't remember the power jack being able to wiggle on that but I didn't have it very long. I also don't remember the touchpad corner being any higher, but the touchpad buttons were a little more level on the first computer.

In comparison to my previous problem these are insignificant and I was just wondering if anyone else has noticed them.

 

Here are a couple of articles...

How to create a set of Recovery Discs.
http://www.kb.sony.com/selfservice/...ES_1_1&dialogID=61434694&stateId=1 0 61438692

How to perform a system recovery using Recovery Discs.
http://www.kb.sony.com/selfservice/...ES_1_1&dialogID=61434717&stateId=1 0 61438725

 

Thanks, but those links are for a different model. I found the CW instructions here.

http://www.kb.sony.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=C1008008&fes=true&mdl=VPCCW18FXB


Has anyone here formatted your drive and installed your own copy of Windows? I'm not happy with the install my CW came with, and I'm going to reinstall with my own Win7 disc. What, if any, problems will I face regarding drivers/FN key issues/etc.

Thanks.

 

Woops sorry about that, thanks for finding the correct article.