Official Sony Vaio Fit multi-flip PC Owners' Thread

Considering getting the 15A, but need to be able to hook it up to a Dell U2711 at 2560x1440.
Seems the best way is to use an HDMI 1.4 > DVI-D cable - did anyone here actually try that on the U2711 (or other 2560 screen)?

 

Android-IA is not officially supported by the Flip. That beind said, I have loaded it on multiple unsupported machines and had no major issues. Obviously, the vast majority of apps(streaming services especially) are not going to work. Youtube will work through Opera Web Browser, Hulu and Netflix don't work, many widget apps don't work, etc. If you just want a low power version of software for general browsing and such, it is great as you will basically double your run time. It won't have the support offered on devices like the Transformef duet and other dual booting machines.

My flip 15 should be shipped in about a week. I may try load it on when it gets here. To post my own question, has anyone done a clean install of Windows and reinstalled the Vaio Control and update software? I will be installing my own ram, wireless card, and ssd. There is a lot of unnecessary crap preloaded on these machines but also a few good things that I want to keep.

 

Try it and see if it works .

If it doesn't then you can just format and remerge the partition.

Please let me know though as I am very interested in this. In fact, going to look into doing it myself now.

 

thanks for the answers guys, I think I'll be doing this tomorrow night (I'm in Italy so it's 1 a.m. here).
in the meantime let me know if someone decide to go through the experimentation (and the results)

 

So no else is having Wi-Fi problems with their Flips?

 

Having the same problem here, though I have the 1920 display. Using batterybar the ETA until empty is about 4 hours. Using batteryinfoview I see the drain rate going anywhere from 6500 to 9000 browsing with chrome. Fully charged capacity is 48k. I am running on power saver from sony control panel. I have seen lots of reports of getting 6 hours plus? What am I missing?

 

hi loudog3114 im in the same situation...the best i have had is 4hour 38mins

cpu 5%
brihtness 30%
ram 20%
hard drive hybrid fluctuation 2 to 4%
cpu when i use water colour brush on artrage 10 12% this is the i7 cpu
cpuz cpu 768 mhz goes up if im doin more drawing
wifi off
geforce graphics card turned off


so people who are saying they are getting 6 hours i cant understand how ...i have said it in other posts the only thing i can think is the 2880 hi res screen is eating the battery and allso the hybrid drive ....
blue tooth off

i spoke to lisa gade mobiletechreview and she says she is getting 6 hours ..here is a command prompt you can put in ..

Try running powercfg /energy from the command prompt and see if it reports anything is using lots of power. Sometimes in Windows 8, Intel display driver updates don't install properly the first time and the power manager will report Intel HD graphics is using too much power

 

I installed the 500GB evo without problems. I cloned the system drive to the evo when connected to a USB external drive connector. Then I swapped out the drives and kept the 5ooGB system drive as a backup to clone off of. The EVO performance was mediocre then I installed samsung magician and it said the system was tuned for HDD. I let it do all it's optimizations and now everything is very speedy off of the evo.

 

I have the high rez 15A and I dont see any way someone can get more than 4 hours when doing basic tasks. If battery life is primary then 15A is not the device to get. For me at least a solid 2 hours is fine as the power and portability is more important. 15A seems perfect, but it does have a lot of problems. I've spent many hours trying to get this thing working right. Disabling Vaio care processes has helped a lot but there are still so many other quirks. When video editing sometimes it is fast and smooth and renders are quick and then other times it seems way worse than my 5 year old Q6600 desktop. I literally flop between absolutely loving to hating this thing daily. Even watching basic streaming videos on this thing will hiccup where even my slowest systems will have no problem...

 

hi bruost..thats the first time that someone with the 2880 screen has said they dont get more than 4 hours ...if you read posts on this forum and the tabletpc forum some people are saying 6 hours ..this i cant belive and wont accept ..the 2880 screen draws more power ...i know that with the 1080p screen you can get 6 hours thats a fact but annoying that people say 6 hours for the 2880 ...my thought no way

 

Bottom of the barrel benchmarks except for the HDD which I upgraded myself. PassMark Software - Display Baseline ID# 202094

Actually it is weird.. When I run another benchmark it is twice as good and when I compare to similar configured laptops it blows them all away. I get 1300-2600 passmark vs the others which range from 300-600. jeez Love it/hate it....

 

I had the 1920 and now have the 2880 and no way over 6 hours with average use. Maybe with everything turned off/down and you are basic wordprocessing/webbrowsing. Dont buy this thing for more than 2 hours of battery life if you are doing real work. When comparing feature to feature against other similar systems it seems like the Flip 15 is unbeatable at it's price but IMO it is riddled with undelying performance issues that hopefully can/will be fixed. Sony Selling the PC business is not a good sign. I returned an ASUS 15" touchscreen laptop to get the Flip. It was almost exactly configured the same except it didn't flip and had 12gb ram vs the 8 in this flip and just the hybrid 1tb drive in the Asus which I did have in the original Flip but this one I have has the EVO SSD.

I had the ASUS for 2 months and now have had the Flip for 2 months. The Asus I ran out of the box super smooth, fast and bug free for video editing and daily photoshop, web viewing, HD streaming etc etc. and did no time trying to optimize or bug fix. I have spent many many hours over 2 months trying to get both Flips operating right and the FAN has been much improved with the current BIOS but overall it is nowhere near the ASUS I had ASUS V551LB-SH71T Vivobook 15.6" Touchscreen Laptop Computer, Intel Core i7-4500U, 12GB Memory, 1TB Hard Drive - Sam's Club

$899 vs the $1400 I paid for the VAIO then added the EVO 500GB for $300 so $1700 vs $900 for what should be a MUCH better system but unfortunately ends up being way worse.

 

Right, but I have the 1080p display, Core i7 model. I use it daily to watch an hour of Netflix when I exercise with brightness at 50% and that uses 15% of the charge, which is better than some of my 13" Ultrabooks with Haswell.

 

I am assuming this is Lisa? Can you do us getting poor battery life a solid and post any errors in your energy report and the typical milliwatt draw? In my energy report, I get a couple errors; one that the intel usb 3.0 device cant enter selective suspend and another saying that ASPM is disabled due to an incompatible device. Really struggling to find the 2 hour gap here...

 

loudog3114, mine reports ASPM is disabled as well. No USB errors. Powercfg says WDboost is using 0.35% CPU util, which it finds worth mentioning (that's the software that manages the 16 gig cache on the hybrid HDD). Windows Defender was doing junk in the background, so that gets a mention in the report. Nothing else of note.

 

Don't use chrome

Envoyé de mon Nexus 4 en utilisant Tapatalk

 

hi lisa did you not in your review mention you installed a samsung evo ssd..i wander how much battery life this is adding ...allso do you disable the geforce card or the intel

 

With the EVO, the machine gets another 20 minutes of battery life. I let NVIDIA Optimus do its thing and pick the graphics card-- it generally does a very good job. So Intel HD for Netflix full HD streaming and web, GT735M for Photoshop and gaming for example.

 

20mins is better than nothing i suppose...i mainly use artrage and the oil or water colour brush..i still only can get aroung 4 and half hours ...so add an ssd and close to 5 hours...so if that is the case i think the 2880 screen is taking an hour of battery life ..the 2880 screen is the best screen ive ever used so sending it back and changing for the 1080p is a tuff choice

 

Its not the 2880 screen, I have the 1920 screen and have the same issue.

 

hi loudog have you got the hybrid drive and how much ram ...and what do you set the screen brightness to ....i would download cpuz and see what your cpu is running at

 

Hybrid drive and the CPU is throttled to 50% max with my power profile, usually sitting at 800mhz.

If somebody getting 6+ hours could report their capacity and discharge rate as reported by batteryinfoview ( BatteryInfoView - View battery information on laptops / netbooks) that would be hugely useful.

 

i agree it would be helpful..i cant see how these people are getting 6 hours ...all i do is draw sketch then have a break ,then carry on and my screen is at 30% and 4.38 hours is the most ive got...very strange situation..im fairly good on computers and still cant figure out ...i know for a fact the hybrid drive is loosing me atleast 20min battery life and the 2880 must be draining ,but you have got the 1080p screen so i just dont get it

 

The only thing I can think of is maybe some are using win 8 and some are on 8.1, or sony shipped the machines with different batteries.

 

I'm using Windows 8.1, which has on several brands of laptops improved battery life. Not sure about 2 hours though!

 

I see a refresh on sony.com of the flip models. I don't see cpu upgrades on the flip 13 though. I want to pull the plug on a 13 but anyone know if the fan issues are fixed?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Just ordered the refreshed 13A with 256 gb pci-e ssd. Ordered over the phone with the sony rep and she confirmed that any improvements on the hardware also have been incorporated in the new models. Buutt we'll see. Knowing Sony they might as well be convinced there were no problems to begin with.

 

Hi,

I am very interesting to Flip 15 (Europe ref -> SVF15N1C5E) but I have some questions.

First, in my country, the flip15 stop to 256Gb max for the SSD, so I want to buy a HDD version and change it with a 500Gb SSD, it's possible technically but do I have secondary effects (system or anything else)?
Second, I want to know if the BIOS let you change CPU voltage and RAM voltage. Also, can I underclock the CPU because Sony offers the 4500U at 4200U price.
Third, on SVF15N1C5E, the two RAM slots are available or not? (I am afraid about one of them is weld...)

Thanks for your answers

 

What's the difference between the refreshed models (that no longer offer customization on their website -- but you can still call to customize?) versus a 1st gen customized (like mine?) My 15A is decent, but there are 3-4 main issues I'm noticing:

* Whenever the computer suddenly jumps to 30%+ or more, the FAN will kick into high gear. This doesn't happen, but sometimes it gets annoying (despite latest BIOS).
* Poor Wi-Fi.
* Keyboard is "sunk" in, leaving the edges flimsy and when you press on it, you can hear it "bounce" back (will post pictures/sounds/more to come).
* When using digitizer, certain parts of the screen seem to wobble, reflecting like a shadow (sort of when you pushed down on an LCD). The screen on my Surface Pro does not "bounce" or move as it's rock hard solid. However, I think this may be unavoidable since I have a HUGE 15" screen that also acts as a digitizer. I guess when you put a pen or hard substance on it, you'll "press" into the screen more than not. However, what I did notice was that the screen wasn't all equal. Certain parts when I pressed the digitizer down shows nothing... other parts will have that LCDish fade.

Anyways, looking to see if I need to send it back to Sony or not... maybe they'll give me a "refreshed" version, heh? Anyone know what the main differences are? Is it the same (just new packaging) or is there actually different/improved hardware?

 

What optimizations have you done? Have you disabled the plethora of startup apps, uninstalled all the bloatware, do you use bluetooth or NFC or do you have them disabled? What about a clean install? I was able to get about an extra 45 minutes (just over 8 hours total consistently with about 15 tabs each in 2 browsers with multiple videos playing at about 40% brightness ) of use out of the Flip 14 I bought for my mother after optimizations without doing a clean install and still using the HDD. I assume the same additional run time can be said for the Flip 15. I guess I will find out when mine comes in. Also, does your 2880x1620 screen exhibit any backlight bleed and how deep are the black levels?

 

yes got rid of all bloarware..and yes got rid disabled stuff ..did a lot of disabling of services etc...when your 2880 arrives please post your battery life ,,would be a great help....the screen has very good black levels..mine had backlight bleed and i must have been lucky as its not as bad as some laptops ive had .it was in the right hand corner ...but honestly not that bad and im ultra picky ...when i got the sony i found for me the colour balance was a tiny bit warm ..now i have got the whites nice and white ..and i must say the reds are the best i have ever seen on a laptop.the trilumonous display does make a difference.....the good thing with the 2880 apart from the battery drain is the fack i can have soooo many windows open and at one point i had sketchbook ,photoshop and artrage running all at once ..plugged in lol....superb display and for an artist the best screen ive used ...not being able to see the pixel structure is a real bonus...and yes wifi and blue tooth was turned off

 

It's a while since I've posted - I guess it's the nature of the beast that you end up using these forums when you want to learn more about the machine or discuss a problem.

Unfortunately, it's a problem this time.

I've had my machine (SVF13N1C5E) for a couple of months now. After some initial teething problems, which were largely sorted by the BIOS update & update to Windows 8.1, I have been very happy with the machine. Once in a while the fan would make that loud growling noise when come out of sleep mode or when being switched on. It was occasional, but annoying when it happened & made me reluctant to open the machine up during meetings. In the last week, the growling happened almost every time. On top of this, even when in silent mode, there is a noise from the fan. It really sounds like it is grinding on something or not quite operating as it should. Anyway, I contacted Sony about this. Straight after sending the email, Microsoft did an update & since then I have done several wake-ups and restarts and the growling has not happened once. Sadly the other fan noise is still there in silent mode, albeit perhaps less pronounced than before.

Sony have got back to me and are saying that I should return the machine to them to have a look at. Given how busy I am and that this is my only PC, I am reluctant to do this (so far they have ignored my request for a temporary replacement), but it's looking more and more as though this will be the only option. Having had a fan fail on a previous PC (not Sony) and have that eventually die due to over-heating problems, I'm looking at trying to find a 5 day window (that's how long Sony estimates will be needed) where I can most be without the machine. I sincerely hope that if I go this route they either replace a whole load of parts so that I end up with essentially remodelled flip (which I've read about by skimming through the pages since I was last posting) or they just give me a new machine. Not sure how likely either of these are.

Apart from these issues, it is still a wonderful machine & although there are a few things I would tweak if I was designing a PC, it is still the machine that does what I want it to do (though admittedly I very rarely do that much flipping into tablet mode). My main problems had been with Windows 8.1 - but the updates have improved this experience together with me getting used to it. Had I waited a few more weeks and got the new updated machine I'm sure I would be extremely happy with what I got, at the moment though I could be happier. Hopefully sometime soon, I will be.

 

BTW, I see there are a lot of posts about battery life. I only ever charge mine up to 80%. I have Outlook, Word, Excel, Chrome & iTunes running the whole time & am using Bluetooth headphones. Like this I easily get 4 to 5 hours. I would have thought that if I turned the Bluetooth speakers off I would get quite a lot more than this. So far I've not had any issues at all with the battery - though a nice, easy button to tell it to do a full charge as a one off rather than having to change the settings would be nice - but this is a Microsoft/Windows issue rather than a Sony one at one level. If we're going to have PCs become more like tablets, we need to be able to have apps and widgets that allow much greater control like our tablets/phones - Apple users can ignore that bit ;-)

 

more important what is your spec.. the best battery life ive reached is 4 hour 38mins

15a
cpu i7
8gb ram
geforce 1gb
500gb hybrid
2880

brightness 30%
wifi off
blue tooth off
virus microsoft
start up programs disabled
indexing off
superfetch off
geforce card disabled..(maybe using this instead of the intel may give me more battery life)

mainly drawing with artrage with water colour and oil brushed ..not big sizes....

cpu utiliz around 10 to 12%
hard disk 2% to around 4%
ram 20% doesnt change


so the story is people are saying 6 hours 5 hours etc etc ..so i can only think ssd instead of hybrid...i5 instead of i7...1080p instead of 2880..


if people could give a realistic battery time on i7 with the 2880 and the hybrid drive would really put my mind at rest ..4 .38 hours just isnt enough for me

 

Have you tried doing a recover to factory settings (hopefully you kept your recovery partition or made recovery media), then immediately download all VAIO and Windows updates, then immediately upgrading to 8.1without installing any additional programs? Maybe installing 8.1 on top of prgrams you installed when you were on 8 is the issue. This helped me with a few quirks not battery-related, but couldn't hurt.

 

Going to pull an image of mine, wipe it, do a fresh install of 8.1 with sony drivers, and see what happens.

 

yea was goin to do a fresh 8.1 install when i have put the evo ssd drive in..but didnt want to do that until i have an idea off other users as ive still got the 30day window to return the 15a

 

Well, I just ordered this:

SVF13N2C5E
8 GB 1600 MT/s DDR3L-SDRAM
512 GB PCIe Flash SSD
Intel® HD Graphics 4400
Intel® Core™ i7-4500U 1,8 GHz
Windows 8.1 Pro
Clean Start
Black
Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 12
HDMI™
Zonder Adobe Lightroom 5
Ethernet/Wi-Fi and VGA-dongle
33,7 cm LED, 1920x1080

We'll see what the refresh brings. I couldn't resist the free CPU upgrade and 6% discount code

 

I don't think they offer this model in the US. When I tried to get a Flip 13 with a 512 ssd they would only offer the non refreshed model.

 

How do I disable the logon password when the computer is first turned on?

 

Type WIN+R, enter netplwiz to bring up User Accounts, and uncheck the box 'Users must enter a username and password to use this computer', reboot to save changes.

 

How do you know you're getting a refreshed or non one model?

Un saludo

 

How long is the battery life of the 15A and 14A?

I don't find serious reviews with this data.

 

Battery Life is a function of power available and usage. Battery is sized at 3170mAh/48Wh at 15.0 Volts. That's full potential in a perfect world. That means you have 3.17 15 Volt 1 hour Amps available. In real world with mid load on the battery, you'll be lucky to tap the battery for 2.7 of those Amps. What does that mean? The function that 14/15a will go from full charge, the moment of unplugging, to PC shutoff point is = [Battery Potential/(Average use load/time + Parasitic load)] *Parasitic load is voltage regulator losses, misc. circuits to sustain bus power.

The point where each users PC will go from full charge to shutdown/sleep is a function of their usage. It's NOT a constant function. Any advertised rate was probably determined by Japanese businessmen watching Low Res videos of school girls in skirts on a screen set to dim and no Sony or MS bloatware to run background tasks that suck battery life. Consumption is the output of the system power bus to all periphery. That is memory, CPU throttle, USB, Bluetooth, Network adapter, HDD usuage, wireless adapter, Screen/Brightness, background tasks, etc. Users are getting anywhere from a couple hours to 4+ Depending on how they manage their consumption when unplugged. The question should really be, what's your time? I get about ~3 hours on the 15a with the stock hybrid disk, 16gb ram, screen set to medium, Bluetooth and NFC disabled, wireless set to medium power, bunch of IE tabs open, Outlook running in background, downloading program in background, PDF and picture view running, etc.. But no heavy programs; drawing, CAD, or Photoshop running.

Furthermore, to calculate consumption in each scenario one would have to remove the battery and tie in a DC power source at 15volts. In between this power supply you would put an amp meter or scope to record the output. Also you'd want to calculate the loss of voltage as the battery drains in relation to available power. Then I guess you could take the stock systems and measure base apps out of the box. Then do a gazillion tests for the infinite possible combinations of total hardware configurations + Hardware system settings + processes running. "Not going to happen." Battery usage is what it is. Hit it hard and it's going to die quick. This isn't a tablet - you're not going to run this thing 24 hours on a charge. Go ahead and choke the settings back when running on batter for a few more minutes that you can sit on the couch before plugging in. The only thing that could have been better is if Sony would have provided a 5V buck-boost charging port that could up the voltage of common 5V battery power sources that most of us carry around anyhow.

 

For the eu model I ordered its because of the pcie ssd and the model nr SVF13N2C5E,
Can always return it if newer pop up


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I replaced my 14A with a 15A and I love the increased performance, especially in applications like Adobe Premiere CS6.

Although the GeForce GT 735M has a 64-bit memory interface, it still performs well in Adobe Premiere for real-time CUDA GPU acceleration (only for accelerated effects).

Also, I haven't had keyboard shift shortcut issues with the Flip 15. The form factor of the 14 inch was nice but I don't think I could live with not having the ctrl+shift+arrow shortcut which I use all the time.

I plan to replace the 1TB HDD on my version with a Samsung Pro 256GB SSD.

 

Hey guys.

According to CPU-Z, the Flip 15 CPU should be able to go up to 2.6Ghz. However, according to the windows 8 task manager, the max cpu speed is 1.8ghz.

Is the CPU being thottled at all? For an i7 this is rather disappointing, even on a ULV.

Also I read earlier in the thread that the GPU is disabled when on battery. Is this true?

 

Download the Intel® Turbo Boost Technology Monitor applet, it'll tell you if Turbo Boost is kicking in. My taskbar CPU meter hovers around 1.7 but the monitor shows Turbo Boost kicking in transiently at times of high CPU load.

 

Well, I wiped mine, installed 8.1 pro fresh, and installed the barebones drivers from sony. Almost the same exact battery life while running a video loop with all background apps killed and the display at 30%, about 4.5 hours. I have just about had it with this thing; from the touch screen becoming unresponsive, to the bullshti battery life, to the flimsey keyboard. It's just not worth the asking price. Time will tell if I decide to keep it or not I guess.

 

Anyone on here using theirs for web design using the stylus?
If so hows it working out for you?