Official VAIO E Series Owners Thread

Notebookcheck: AMD Phenom II X3 P820 Notebook Processor

Very bad it seems.

My i3 330m is a powerful cpu by comparison. Yay!

 

hey, i was wondering about nvidia Vs ATi issues

i'm playing resident evil 5 on my ea notebook, and yes the game says "nVidia, the way it's meant to be played"

and yes, the images in the game overbright all the time, i was wondering is it really like this?
and how can i check my ATi catalyst version (i can't find 10.5 or other numbers mentioning the version, it just says "2010.0113.2257.41150") what version is that?
thanks

 

Anybody know if the US SonyStyle has refreshed?

Only difference I can see if that I seem to recall there being two pre-configured options on there and now there's one, but I can't be sure.

Configurable options, I see nothing changed from what I remember...

 

Sounds like it has been refreshed - EU SonyStyle has been and there are no changes to configurable options, just a price tweak or two and the addition of some AMD processors to pre-configured options.

edit: oh, and the 14" and 17" are back to configure, minus the 5650 option on the 14"

 

Mythda..

Does this driver also update the graphics card I purchased?...

"ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 512MB"

I am having trouble with the screen being stuck on full brightness when it wakes from hibernate..

Thanks

 

Yup, it supports any 2000 to 5000 series GPU.

 

Would you know why Sony has not released this update? I usually updated my software/drivers via vaio update, but can't see this every being mentioned.

 

Oh don't look at the Sony updates - they very rarely update graphics drivers, the one they have up there now is probably 6 months old. In general they don't update the driver unless there's a specific issue, whereas ATI release a new driver every month.

 

Should i complain or ignore it?

 

Thanks for that, i will update it tonight..

Is their any other major updates I should look out for?

 

Not particularly, no - graphics driver is really the only important one.

 

Still waitting for EA (14inch) release in Canada, any1 have the date?

 

I'm very pleased to see that that the EA 14" is available to customise again in the UK. I placed my order yesterday.

There are some minor changes in the EA since the refresh. The core i3 is no longer available in the customise version (strange?!), the base processor is the core i5-430m. Also the GPU has been upgraded, before the refresh it was the ATI 5145 512mb, now it's the ATI 5470 512mb. I'm happy with the GPU upgrade. The same spec before the refresh is now slightly more expensive (£40 extra) but I felt the 5145 was poor in comparison to the CW series which had the Nvidia 330M so I personally am not too fussed about paying the extra.

The spec i've ordered is:

Core i5-430M
4gb
1600x900
320gb
glossy black
DVD-writer
Extended Battery - VGP-BPS22A

I wanted the bluray drive but in selecting that the estimated shipping jumps from 2-3wks to 5-6wks and I need it asap. From ordering yesterday I've since received an email stating estimated delivery to be 8-15th June. If that's right then it's much quicker than i expected. I wonder if those having to wait a long time for their EA laptops have chosen the blu-ray option?

Incidentally if you order by phone (UK) you can get free next delivery whereas you pay extra for that online. The rest of it is the same price over the phone as it would be ordering online so don't lose out. I just happened to mention that I needed it as soon as possible when asking about the estimated delivery and the lady upgraded gave me free next day delivery, nice.

 

Btw - Since I ordered the extended battery with my EA I wont be needing or using the standard battery when it comes so if anyone wants to buy a new Sony Original VPG-BSP22 3500maH battery, drop me a PM.

 

So much for a refresh. Its more like an option reduction with hiked up prices.

My Laptop, i3, 320gb, 4gb RAM, ATI 5650, 1920 Full HD screen and blu ray writer cost me £759.

The equivalent laptop with an i5 chip instead of the i3 (i3 no longer available) costs £1169. Previously the i5 upgrade from an i3 was only £50 so how did £809 suddenly become £1169. Actually how did £909 suddenly become £1169 since the bluray writer was a free offer but was a £100 option at the time.

It looks like prices have increased at least for the EC 17 inch series. Am glad I bought mine when I did.

It looks like its only the EC 17 inch series that have increased in price the most. Maybe Sony are trying to differentiate the EC models a bit more since it was virtually the same price as the EB series before.

 

Does anyone could post some real/in person pictures or videos of the EA ?
I looked for it and I only found this video: YouTube - Sony Vaio EC / EA Multimedia Notebooks Hands On and some photoshoped pics :S

Thank you in advance :]

 

Youtube has a few videos of the EA. just in the search box put in Sony vaio e series.

 

I customized one today
but it says 3 weeks!!!

is that true or will it take longer????

 

what spec did you go with?

I think the delivery times largely depend on the component selected and availability of those components but I could be wrong.

 

Yeah different components selected will affect the delivery time, but that's taken into account with the estimate they give you. It should be fairly accurate, but it's just an estimate - it could take longer, or it could come sooner, and it is subject to change.

 

Has anyone had any CPU throttling issues with their E? I haven't noticed any issues with actual real life use, but I was doing some stress testing and noticed that the CPU has a tendency to clock itself down to 1200mhz when both cores are under 100% load AND the GPU is loaded too. No issues if just the GPU is in use, or just the CPU, or if the GPU and CPU are loaded but not to 100% - just if everything is fully loaded up, which doesn't really occur in real usage.

 

I ordered my laptop on 11th of May, with an estimated shipping date of 1st - 8th of June. Not had a production email yet so I'm assuming it's been put back. Didn't get a blu-ray drive but did get a free upgrade to a 500Gb HDD so that may be the delay.

 

Is it CPU usage spikes?. I have been experiencing this recently. Also the high pitch noise when I run my laptop on battery. Any known solution or reasons?

 

No it's not usage spikes, not related to that.

re: the noise on battery, I have two: one is caused when the CPU is idle and drops into its lower voltage power saving states, the other goes away when I unplug my USB device.

 

It's now arrived

Very impressed. I was expecting it to be slightly "chunky" but actually it's pretty slim. Screen (it's the 1080p one) is amazing, pin-sharp and very bright. I don't seem to have the high-pitched noise on battery power which is a real relief.

All in all there's not really anything I can fault about it, I don't really like the crapware that comes on it but that will go soon enough. The system is very responsive. Now to install some games and see how good the graphics are.

 

Having gushed all that, I just watched a bit of Inglorious s and the speakers are a bit pathetic! Picture is great though... but why does the Aero theme switch off when you run WinDVD?

 

Dude, are the speakers totally crap or would you say they are just average for a laptop?

Also, would you mind seeing if the HDD has space for one of the thicker 12.mm 1TB drives?

Thanks!

 

Costco is gonna have an "E" series model on sale the next week.
VPC-EB1SFX

Dunno what screen res it has, or what video card but sounds promising at 900 bones. Everyone satisfied with their e series so far?

 

The sound seems fine apart from when using winDVD to watch films so I guess it may be a problem with that program. A little bit annoying as clearly one of the main reasons for getting a full HD laptop is to watch films, and I don't really want to have to buy software for that.

I'm afraid I can't be bothered to disassemble the machine to see about the HDD!

 

In my opinion the speakers are totally fine for a laptop. I've come to expect nothing more from a tiny device.

As for windvd disabling aero. Must be the video output module trying to output in the old sort of video overlay, breaking compability with aero but also stopping you from being able to take screenshots of the movie.

 

well in my opinion sony coul make the speaker a lot better,
my old vaio (CR) have much better speaker than my new E series
it's too bad for this laptop having such bad speaker and bad port locating.

 

How many extra hours does the higher capacity battery at 5000mAh give compared to the standard 3500mAh battery included with E series vaios?

I'm just wondering if it is worth buying or if it doesn't make that much difference to battery life.

 

Dude, you don't have to disassemble! Ya just have to take off the back and have a look inside - would be cool if you could!

 

bought the i3/5650 sony EB a week ago with an estimated shipping time of 5-6 weeks. after reading this thread i regret not getting a 1080p screen. is the 1366x768 screen really that bad? it's primarily gonna be used for web surfing, word editing and a bit of gaming. is it possible to get it changed now or is it too late?

 

If the laptop has not gone into production yet (you get an email notification when it does) then you can cancel the order and then order a new one. If it has, you can still return the laptop to Sony once it arrives after 30 days, get a refund and then place another order.

So the answer is yes you can

I also recently placed an order for an EB series with a 1080p screen but have not recieved the production email yet.

 

Am reading your message on the 1366x768 and I can see the whole message without scrolling

Web surfing on this res is fine.

Word editing is fine

Gaming is... kindof fine. More graphical settings can be turned to high due to the lower resolution. But there's the thing with some people wanting to be gaming at a really high resolution also, so it's a matter of taste on this one.

Now.. things that are not fine:

• With 1080p videos it's obviously not possible to see all pixels. I don't mind 720p personally, but it's a matter of how much you give a damn.
  
• Video/image editing/creation software, spec Cinema4d, Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, could really benefit from a larger screen so you have more space for the actual video/image to work with.
  
• You could get a crappy display. I'm saying "could" because I saw some E-series lappys in a retailers store not long ago that had the low res screen and they had worse colors and viewing angles than my own Vaio EB has.

I'm sure there are more things you could list here.

 

Everything is AWESOME about this lappy, EXCEPT for the speakers which are totally CRAP (by far the worst in a laptop ever owned) and annoying proc buzzing.

 

Hi All,
I wanted to install XP SP3 along with the given OS. I created 3 partitions with Easus parition master. the current os is completely working fine. when i boot from xp cd it copies initial files but before the display option of selecting drive it gives blue screen saying some error. I wonder other users also had some probles during installation. Any one having some idea how to do it? I am not sure but is it related to this SATA driver issue?

 

Hi Guys,

Got an EB 14 and was pretty happy with the laptop. Only pain point I had is the tinny speakers. Indeed poor ones. Other than that everything was fine until i wanted to change my OS. I have created recovery discs(4 in total). Then changed my OS to Windows 7 ultimate. Again i wanted to go to my default OS. So i have put on the recovery disc one and selected system restore. While formatting at 18%, it threw an error saying the recovery disc is corrupted or damaged. I removed it and after that the system says only " Operating System not found". I have given it sony service center. I am just curious why my system throws this error. Can anyone shed some light?

 

well obviously it got to 18% and some vital files which assured the well functioning of the OS got deleted... therefore it cannot boot correctly anymore.
Well at least this is my opinion. It might be something else.

 

Try to repair with install dvd,your bootmanager is deleted.

 

Has anyone else noticed a small electric shock from touching the vga port on the left? must have bare feet.

VPC-EB16FG

(core i-3,4gig,1080 screen,5650)

 

Hello, new to forum. I have a 15.5 I slapped a Vertex LE SSD into. It boots super fast; 18 seconds from cold start to Firefox open. It screams. I know I am splitting hairs, but in a test benchmark under highest power it comes out with really low sequential writes and low 4k writes. According to OCZ forums, it is because of BIOS set power saving such as C1E and speedstep. Of course, no options like that in a VAIO laptop. So... what do we know about bios modding?

 

Having read 45 pages of this thread can I just confirm which are the bad screens as I went into comet to look at screens and saw the considerable difference in quality on two machines that looked the same. (its impossible to memorise sony model numbers for later perusal on the net)?
cheers
tony

 

Not quite sure what you mean by 'bad screens' but there are only two - the regular 1366x768 and the full HD 1920x1080, the full HD one being of higher quality.

 

it was on the regular 1366 x 768 looked washed out and not very bright, nothing like as good as my old vaio. So it must have been the 1920 x 1080 that looked much better though I'm still not sure why exactally
I'm replacing a HP i brought last year because of its terrible display, I use it mostly for designing web pages in photoshop.
There is a 17" version with a 1600 x 900 but I hav'nt seen any of those...does anyone know if the display is any good?

 

No idea about the 17" screen, I haven't seen any. But the 1920x1080 screen looks better and brighter than the 1366x768 because it's an all round higher quality screen beyond just the resolution - I assume the same would be the case on the 1920x1080 screen vs 1600x900 on the 17" but I couldn't tell you for sure.

 

I am soo looking forward to tomorow! they say it'll be delivered between 9am to 5pm...
!!

YaYY!


yeah baby!! got it! awesome man... here is what i think:

the quality is great!.... (this is what i think) ... those reviews stuff is a professional thing. they have to give scores. but for the end user(me) it means the product is good enough!
e-g. most of the reviews on the web.. i-e on the notebook check etc websites, they say that the EB is boxy bulky design ... and what i thought before recieving the actual thing was
a big box filled of hardware .. but this is not the case.

the rest of the laptop is just great. the only issue i was concerned with was the design according to reviews.

and one more thing. the 1080p screen is Great.. i mean the same review stuff goes for this again. it is more than enough of the quality i'd expected.

btw my machine is an EB.. with i3, HD5650, 1080p screen and 3GB ram.

the score in the windows experience index is 5.5 ( i dont think it really matters but still )

see ya mates... let me poke around a lil

 

Am I the only one who thinks the build quality is poor. I've had the 15 5 inch version for a little less than two months now and I just realised that the sides of the laptop lip is getting a bit loose. Did they use glue or something because I'm afraid after a long time the shell (i have no idea what to call the the plastic which is attached to the lid) may come out. Also the cd driver creeks a lot when carrying my laptop. Kinda disappointed with sony though I know this may be a budget model, I expected good build quality from sony.

Bobbyacid I have also noticed the small electric shocks but it happens sometimes only.

 

The electric shock is supposed to happen when u have bare feet nd touch the ground and the port simultanously! its a simple principle of current!


BTW guys, i installed the 10.5 drivers correctly but the gpu clock tool aint working. it says no such devices found. :S

please help as ive only overclocked nvidia cards before and the ones on desktop only :|