Official VAIO E Series Owners Thread

Thanks, this is for the US version right.

Couldn't find any drivers on the Sony UK support site.

Am fed up now and will wait for Sony to reply.

 

Hi

Can someone please help. I have UK EB model with the 1080 HD screen.

I have the Vaio setting on full brightness but need it brighter to watch tv progs. So I change the brightness setting in the Ati CCC from -19 (default) to 0 and apply it and looks good. But now and again it will always reset back to -19. Is there some setting on the Vaio that is automatically changing the Ati setting back to the defaults?

Thanks

 

Check vaio control center Display -> color mode setting. Disable it if it's on. Check other settings around there aswell and disable them.

Also, for the record ccc 10.6 does not save video playback color settings for me. Had to revert (do a clean install) of 10.5.

 

just got mine today.

 

Welcome to the club

 

@uncensored410

What configuration do you have? Just like to know what gives the 4.7 score.

 

Would also like to know that. My i3 machine gets 5.6, lowest being the hard drive. I'm guessing however that there is a HD 5470 or Intel GMA HD in uncensored410's machine. The GMA HD would make sense since there is about 0.4 GB reserved RAM.

 

How long do these laptops usually take to manufacturer? How long after the "order in production" email does it usually take to be ready for dispatch? I got that email on the 20th June and it said estimated shipping of 25th-30th June. When should I expect the dispatch email?

Yes I assumed that as well. My intel gma 4500m gets a 3.2 (previously a 3.5 until I installed Windows 7 and had to install new drivers). So a 4.7 could possibly be the intel hd graphics. If so, then it looks like they have been improved alot since the gma 4500m. And that would make the ati 5470 a 5.x score and the 5650 a 6.x I guess.

 

You might not even get one, I didn't get my dispatch email til a week after the laptop arrived at my door..

My estimate was pretty much on target, though

 

Oh really? I guess that's good news then. I was getting a bit worried that it had been delayed as I had not recieved the dispatch email yet and time on the estimated delivery is running out.

I hope it still turns up tomorrow or the day after that would be a nice surprise

 

Hello,
I just bought an EB-series vaio here in Sweden yesterday, and got this confounding instruction book for "VAIO International Repair Service" in my box, which I had no idea existed.

What is the deal with this, exactly? Does the fact that I received this manual mean it applies to my notebook?
I read the terms and conditions regarding eligible customers and products, but can't for the life of me figure out if it whether it does apply or not (the kind of english one comes across in terms and conditions is not my forte).

I guess there used to be a list of applicable models on the VAIO-link homepage in the past, but it seems to be empty right now.
Tried calling Sonystyle as well, but the woman I spoke to hadn't even heard of it.

 

Hi Cakefish,

I'm about to order the same config you have, from sonystyle UK.
(No sony.style Hungary). So my question:
Is UK and US keyboard layout the same?
Thank you in advance
Zakkant

 

I don't think so. There are slight differences between them.

British and American keyboards - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

By the way, my laptop spec was £799.01 on Sony Style UK

 

So "English QWERTY keyboard" means British. Not a big deal.

I go for a white EB but with 320 GB only (I will replace with an SSD for £749.
The greyish 1366x768 display isn't tall enough for my Excel works.

 

You can replace hdd for an ssd in E series?

 

Yes. I am running a 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. It is a very easy upgrade as the back panel has a removable access cover to the HDD.

 

FYI, Newegg.com now has this config for $830

i5 430M
4GB DDR3
ATI 5650
1366x768
320GB 5400rpm <- this is a huge nono but I can upgrade to SSD or put a faster HDD in there later.

I'm thinking about jumping on it just because I believe Sony's build quality is better than HP and Acer, with competitive products.

 

That would only be an option for me if ssd's came down in price considerably and if Sony warranty covers the swapping in/out of hdd's.

 

Price is the drawback. The 100 GB drive I put in allows boot in 15 seconds, scores 7.7 in WEI, and makes EVERYTHING a lot snappier because of the 0.1ms file access load vs the 15.0ms load on the HDD. It also uses about 30% less power than a HDD (earlier rumors were saying a lot more power savings, but it is closer to 30% as tested on anandtech and guru3d). But, it was 300 bucks and only has 100 GB of space. For me this is not a problem as I only use about 50GB on my laptop and have external storage if needed.

Warranty coverage isn't really a problem. Just put the standard HDD back in if you file a claim and need to return it. There is no magic seal/sticker you remove to access the back storage panel showing you added the SSD nor is the bios capable of keeping a record of what disks have been installed in the past. It is just screws you remove and then replace.

 

I will install an Intel x25M G2 80GB in the EB. I had it in a HP netbook and made huge difference (XP pro, not W7 but booted in 15 sec !). The Atom was the limiting factor there. For OS and apps 80GB is absolutely OK, for storage there are the externals. eSATA is fine then.

 

Just out of curiosity, what size of ssd fits in a lappy like the vaio EB? I guess 2.5", but there are some ssd's marked 2.5" 1/8H so I'm getting confused.

 

But I would lose the recovery partition and windows install and to be honest, for me, it's not worth that hassle. I'll just buy an ssd with my next laptop a few years from now when ssd's are much cheaper.

I would have bought a 7200 rpm hdd straight away but Sony Style UK didn't have that option for the EB series. Then, a few weeks after I ordered my laptop a 320GB 7200 rpm became available . It was annoying, although I still have the extra capacity as, currently, there is still no 500GB 7200 rpm hdd on Sony Style UK. Hopefully, I'll still see a performance increase over my current laptop which also has a 5400 rpm hdd (although much lower capacity at 160GB).

 

Just for the record: There is an option in vaio care (the assist button) in the vaio recovery section to burn recovery discs onto DVD-Rs, so it's not much of a hassle to do whatever you want with the hard drive after that.

 

I wouldn't really want the recovery partition on an SSD as it takes up valuable space - it'd cost you about £30 worth of storage to keep it! I don't trust DVDs either though as they have a tendency to fail on me at about a rate of 25%.. which isn't great when there's 3 recovery DVDs.

I should be grabbing an SSD to put in my EB next week sometime, I'll just keep my old HDD safe somewhere as a backup.

 

Me again
Im finally going to pull the trigger on this Sony E:
* Intel® CoreTM i5-520M, 2.40GHz
* Glossy black
* 500 GB Serial ATA (5400 rpm)
* 4 GB 1066MHz DDR3-SDRAM
* Blu-ray Disc(TM) writer
* 39.4 cm LCD, 1920x1080, webcam
* ATI MobilityRadeon HD5650 1GB

I do have a few questions though.

1) What kind of battery life can I expect? I used to own a Dell 1520 and with the brightness on low, everything except wi-fi turned off, I used to get 2 1/2 to 3 hours, can I expect the same?

2) Do "we" have any preference on what kind of finish to get? They are offering black, pink, white, brown, glossy black, glossy white and glossy pink all for the same price

3) Whats the screen and speakers like? Are the viewing angles good? I will be watching a lot of movies and listening to music so it's quite important. Saying that, i've only ever used a Dell Inspiron before so my definition of good isnt probably the same as someone who owns a Vaio Z or something, if you get what I mean?

4) Portability wise, how does everyone find it?

Thanks to anyone who can answer some/all of these

 

Hey it arrived

Starting it up now...

 

I've had my EA for a couple of weeks now. I love it but there a couple of issues.

The main one being battery drain. This is happening in both hibernation and when the laptop is fully shutdown. I'm experiencing 10% drain just after a couple of hours of it being shutdown. I'm away at the moment but I intend to contact Sony regarding this when I get back.

Occasionally on resuming from hibernation the screen will be stuck at full brightness. Using Fn + the F5 brightness key makes no difference to the brightness even though the bars appear on screen going down. (this has only happened twice in 2wks though).

Finally I do have the high pitched noise that has been reported by other E series owners. At first it bugged me but to be honest i hardly notice it now. It's annoying that it's there but I'm not sure I'd be sending it in for repair just for this problem.


That's the bad news, the good news..

The keyboard is a dream to type on, the screen (1600x900) is fantastic. I was worried 1600x900 on a 14" would make text difficult or uncomfortable to read but not at all. It's the perfect resolution. I haven't need to zoom in or change the dpi settings. 1 bar less than maximum brightness was plenty bright enough to see the screen in sunlit conditions.

The touchpad on the EA series is in my opinion is much more preferable to the one on the EB series. This one has a slight texture but it's not bobbily like the EB which i didn't like.

 

1) 2h30 to 3hrs is about what you can expect

2) It's personal preference really. I have the glossy black and it's a nice finish, but it does show up the smudges and fingerprints if that bothers you.

3) The HD screen is pretty good, one of the better ones I've seen. Not spectacular, mind you, but definitely a good screen. Plenty of brightness and the angles are decent. The speakers aren't great, though, but that's pretty commonplace with laptops.

4) It mostly sits in my house, but it's pretty good. Not an ultraportable obviously, but for what it is - a mainstream 15" all-purpose laptop - it's fairly tidy and not at all bulky.

 

See, told you it'd be on time

 

How big is the recovery partition on the EB?
On my FW41 it was 16GB.
I'm going to make a virgin-backup of the whole HDD and save the image on my 2TB WD. Than mirror everything on the SSD. 80-16GB still a lot even for dual-boot W7, XP and for data in use.

This is a great app http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/ for backups. You run it under W7 recovery consol or from USB Live XP.

 

Mythdat you are a gentleman and a scholar!
Thank you

Considering it's significantly cheaper than my other alternative (the Dell SXPS16) i'd be tempted to get this and then possibly, if it's needed, in the future purchase an ultra portable or something

2 more things i've been pondering since i've been researching this (since about 9am this morning lol)

1) Whats the difference between the i5-450m and i5-520m? The 450 is being offered for no cost on the Sony website right now and the 520 is £30 added extra

2) I've found out that the Vaio extended warranty doesn't include any form of accidental damage (nor do any of the customized laptops for that fact), so is it worth purchasing the extra 2 years (£130) or can I get it with the 1 and then as it's nearing the end add more years onto it if it's needed ala How Dell do it

Im really tempted to go for the glossy black but I just know i'll regret not getting the matte when there are finger marks all over it! lol

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-compaq-voodoo-pc/495204-i5-450-vs-i5-520-a-5.html

 

For #1 the link in the post above mine explains pretty well

For the warranty.. I have no idea, I never even looked at it, I never look at warranties. I just went for the cheapest.. so I'm not the best person to ask

One thing you should know before you pull the trigger, though: Sony undervolt the GPU in the E-Series, which limits overclocking potential on a GPU that overclocks very well. Generally the aim is to bring the 5650 up to 5730 speeds (the 5650 is just a 5730 with lower clocks) which you can still do fine, but pushing beyond that is harder. On the bright side, the lower voltage keeps it cool. It's pretty much impossible to overheat it, bar going out into the desert and filling the vents with builders foam.

 

Cheers for that, i'll check it out

Cheers for the advice
So to get the clocks back up (to default or perhaps 5730) do I need to faff and fiddle around a lot?
I really can't be bothered with having to open something or tweak a setting every time I fancy playing a game or watching a HD video or something
I fully appreciate they do it to keep the temps down but isn't that...cheating?

 

The problem is caused by the ati drivers try to unistall them and install the original ati drivers provided by sony

 

There's not much faffing and fiddling, just open AMD GPU Clock Tool, type in 2 numbers, click set clocks and it's done. You won't need to do it to watch HD movies or play most games, it's plenty powerful enough at default clocks, but you'll need to manually set it when you want the extra power.

I suppose it is cheating to most, but even undervolted it still runs fine at normal 5650 clocks. As far as Sony are concerned that's fine, they don't care if it restricts overclocking.

 

Well, I've been able to play around a little with my new Vaio

From what I've seen it's definately an improvement over my old HP , except for a few very minor things. I have already got used to the 1080p screen - makes everything on the screen on the 1366x768 resolution on my other laptop look huge!

I think the performance is being limited by all the Sony bloatware clogging it up - at the moment it's using over 1.5GB RAM on idle! Everything isn't very snappy and steam and other programs often end up not responding. So I'm going to clean up the programs a bit - there are so many things installed though! I'm downloading steam games as I speak and will be installing some others to see how they perform. I hope all my older games will work with the 64 bit OS.

So much more to say but I'll use it a bit more and see how things go...

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/146033-how-optimize-any-sony-vaio-semi-clean-install.html

 

Earlier today, I was chatting with my friend on yahoo messenger when suddenly the chat window was scrolling up and down erratically. I moved the cursor and clicked the open browser and suddenly the contents zoomed in and out on its own. It's rather weird (I was using external mouse), I then touched the touchpad and it stopped for a second, then it went back to zooming in and out again.
Turning off multitouch gesture cured the problem, but then for the first time since I bought the laptop, I have touchpad problem that has been described quite many times here, cursors jumping around the screen, won't follow my finger movements, etc.
Without doing anything, the touchpad is back to normal now. I re-enabled multitouch gesture and pinch zoom works fine and didn't do the auto zoom in and out like before.
I really don't know what triggered the touchpad erratic behavior.

Apart from touchpad issue, I had several weird glitches:

1. One time when I first turn on my computer in the morning, it says starting windows as usual, but then it goes to "Prepare your VAIO for the first time" screen, when I clicked cancel, I get an error message that some file(s) in windows32 went missing or something like that, and the windows looks basic (no aero), my desktop background missing, and all my files in the desktop was missing. I restarted the computer and everything went back to normal. Weird.

2. Just earlier when I had erratic touchpad problem, I restarted the computer and when it says starting windows, it goes to VAIO Recovery center. I closed it and everything was normal except the touchpad was still erratic. The touchpad then decided to fix itself a few mins ago without me doing anything.

3. The aero animation in slow motion still shows up sometime. Disabling the microphone like bobbyacid said didn't work for me. I did some googling and it seemed windows issue rather than sony issue.

I'm using avast free antivirus with up-to-date engine and definitions, and no threats detected. Windows bit-defender also reported the system is clean. So I really don't know what caused #1 and #2 glitches.

 

Dude haha, you must be King of the E series or something!
I am sorry to keep asking questions , im just trying to make sure im making the right choice, it's a lot of wonga to me. Not to mention you've been stupidly helpful to me so far

When you say overclocking, you mean to get the card back to ATi's stock clock speeds or possibly as quick as a 5730 (if I want to push it a bit harder)?

Im guessing this AMD GPU Tool runs during startup or something, with an icon down in the notification area?

If I can help it, i'd prefer not to have to mess about with things like that but I guess further down the line it would be handy knowing I could squeeze a bit more juice out of the card (and thats just bringing it up to stock levels). It's something for me to ponder.

Do Sony underclock it significantly?

 

S'ok, happy to help - like you say it's a lot of cash, gotta make sure you get it right

AMD GPU Tool doesn't run at startup, it's just a program that you run, set the clocks, then you can close it again. You could also use MSI Afterburner, which I think can run at startup and have different profiles you can switch between from a notification area icon with one click.

By overclocking I mean pushing it beyond 5650/5730 levels. Even undervolted it's perfecttly comfortable with being brought up to ATI's stock speeds, it's just beyond that becomes a bit more tricky. It won't overclock as much as 5650s in other laptops

It's clocked at 450/790, whereas most other manufacturers use 550-600/~800. But like I said, it's very easy to bring it up to those levels and a bit beyond, I usually play games at 620/880.

 

Executive summary: EB laptop is a huge improvement over previous 5-year-old machine (duh!); new hard drive, not so much.

Just a little treatise on swapping hard drives and comparative machine speeds in a real-world application (this is a long story!):

A couple of months ago, I purchased a ready-made EB (specs below) from J&R Electronics in New York, because the U.S. CTO site didn’t (and still doesn’t!) offer the 1080P screen as an option. The price was great compared to other 15” laptops offering a 1080P screen – I got it for about $950, which ended up being closer to $900 after the Bing rebate. I had to make a couple of compromises though. It was an i3, and I would have preferred an i5. Also, it came with a 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive (Samsung, as it turned out), where what I really wanted was 7200 RPM.

Drive speed seemed important, because being an event photographer who processes a lot of images on location with Adobe Lightroom, having fast read and write times can mean the difference between my getting 5 hours of sleep on a given night, vs 6 hours. At least that’s how it was with my old (now dead) laptop, which was a 5-year old single-core Pentium M 2.0 Ghz (same amount of RAM).

Anyway, I bought a Western Digital 320GB 7200 drive, and planned to bring it to the Sony Style store for them to install it, so I wouldn’t void my new notebook warranty. But before I did that, I decided to run a test. I imported about 300 images into Lightroom, did my usual image processing, and then exported the whole batch into a different folder on the C drive. (Lightroom just stores the processing instructions with a “virtual copy” of the files, and then actually processes the files upon export.). The whole export part of this, which is the compute-intensive part, used to take between 45 minutes and an hour with a similar number of files on the old machine.

The first surprise was that the total export time was, instead of 45—60 minutes as on the old computer, less than 3 minutes on the new computer! OK, so given how much faster the i3 is, maybe I didn’t need to swap drives after all. But since I had the new 7200 RPM drive anyway, I cloned the original drive to it, and brought it in for the tech guy to swap.

It’s way too late to make a long story short, but after swapping drives, exporting those same 300 files took twice as long (almost 6 minutes) on the new, supposedly faster 7200 Western Digital drive. The techs told me that there are other factors in drive speed such as latency, difference in ratings methods, etc, and that yeah, it was quite possible for the original 5400 RPM drive to be faster than the replacement 7200 RPM drive. So I had them switch the drives back (which they kindly didn’t charge me for), and I’m now using the WD drive for external storage.

So apart from the drive speed lesson, I learned that the new i-series processors are WAY, WAY, faster than the old Pentium M. I thought that there might be other factors, like maybe the Lightroom 3 beta is faster than the older 1.4 version that was on my previous laptop, but I found out on my home machine that the opposite is true -- the Lightroom 3 beta ran about five times _slower_ on that machine than the old Lightroom 1.4 did. So even with a much slower version of the software, the EB runs Lightroom 15—20 times faster than the old laptop. Hope that wasn’t too confusing.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the EB overall, although as a minor complaint, I really don’t care for the feel of the chiclet keyboard. Nothing’s perfect. ) As always, YMMV.

Current notebook: Sony VAIO E VPCEB17FX/B 15.5":
· 2.13GHz Intel Core i3-330M
· 4GB (2x2GB) RAM
· 500GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
· Blu-ray ROM with DVD Burning
· ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 Graphics
· 15.5" Widescreen Display
· Integrated Webcam and Microphone
· Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
· Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
· 5.9 lb

Current desktop:
Homebuilt w/ Intel 940EE dual core hyperthreaded CPU, ASUS P5WD2 Premium mobo, 4 GB RAM, etc….., running XP--SP3.

 

Does anyone know how to get the Vaio logon screen back (you know, when it logs on and off instead of the default windows 7 theme)? Because it has vanished and been replaced with the standard Windows 7 one but all I did was update the graphics driver!

Still getting used to many things - for one I keep putting it to sleep because I keep accidentally pressing the power button (my old laptop had the power button in the middle)! Also, the power adapter is much shorter than my old laptop's which is a bit inconvienient. And the fact that the speakers are a quite a bit quieter than my old laptop's. Apart from these very minor inconviences I really like my new Vaio! Still alot more to investigate!

 

I prefer the Windows one, the VAIO one is a bit dull..

I don't know why the graphics driver would do that, but maybe it turned off OEM background. Open up regedit and check - go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background, doubleclick the OEMBackground key and check it's set to 1

 

Genius you are

Also, I realized it wasn't graphics driver - it happens everytime I switch the desktop theme.

 

Thanks for this review! I am thinking of getting the same laptop. How do you like the 1080p display? Are the colors fairly accurate? How is the brightness in a well lit room? How is the build quality? How do Blu-ray movies look?

 

Is there any graphics driver (or any other way) to get the 1080p screen go to 1366x768 resolution? It's not listed as a supported mode. I just need to lower the resolution of some games to make them playable and 1366x768 is a good compromise between quality and performance.

 

Once again thanks Mythdat
The AMD GPU Tool sounds perfect, im a bit of a...freak...when it comes to keeping my computers running smooth so I don't like having lots of icons down in the notification area or things loading during startup! I can't help it! haha
If it's just a case of loading the program, entering the info, closing the program once then it's something even I can handle doing

Im so tempted to order this bad boy today

 

Hmm I thought it was an option, not on my laptop atm so can't check. Do the games themselves not have the option to run at 1366x768 in their options? If not there's most like a command line option to do it if you look around

I'm the same, the only thing I have running at startup is my antivirus, everything else is purged. But yeah, it's just.. open program, type in two numbers, click button, done. You also have to click one button to reset default clocks when you're done or ATI's powerplay won't work, but they reset on a restart too

 

No, all games (and demos) I've tried have not been able to play at 1366x768. If you can go to 1366x768 please could you tell me which driver version you have? I'm using 10.6 at the moment. Thanks!

I've also managed to overclock to 650/800 using the AMD GPU Clock Tool (don't know if I could go higher but it wasn't struggling at all). Gave a few fps more so could be useful.

Actual game performance is quite good but obviously it has it's limits. I've tried all Orange Box games which run maxed out at native resolution (but struggles a bit with AA). Also Just Cause 2 Demo runs quite well at high(ish) settings at 720p. Lost Planet Demo also runs quite well at high(ish) and 720p. I'm going to try many more game demos over the next few days to decide which to actually buy! I'm even considering Crysis, but don't really know what to expect performance-wise and unfortunately there is no demo to test

Loving the Vaio E so far!!!