Official VAIO E Series Owners Thread

It's very easy. There's a panel on the underside of the laptop for the HDD bay, just need to unscrew a few screws, pop it off, unscrew the HDD and fit the new one.

 

Hi ravenperch and sheriffadam - Thank you kindly for your suggestions. Unfortunately, despite your suggestions and my research on the issue, I was unable to reduce the fan noise. I returned the model to the retailer and they said that there wasn't a faulty component. It's just the design of the model. I have reluctantly exchanged it for another model (not a Sony I'm afraid). So bye bye beautiful screen. I can report that my new model (a Lenovo Z570) is much quieter and even has different options for reducing fan noise depending on what you're doing. But it doesn't have that beautiful Full HD screen. So I was a Vaio owner for a little under 2 weeks! Pity.

 

Wow that was easy boy, seeing the newer Dell (Inspiron 15r you have to tear every piece apart till the mobo itself..gulp ). So be it then sony otw !!!!!

 

I guess that's your choice. Lenovo laptops are very reliable and durable. They are excellent laptops. Unfortunately their prices do not justify the sup-par features compared to the VAIO's but overall, I'd reccommend Lenovo's to anyone, they're practically fail safe! Sad to see you leave Sony! Maybe you could have considered the new Z and S series laptops.

 

much better

 

thats weird because on mine I get



and I have the E series too

 

i have microsoft drivers......you;

 

k, so quick question:
My Sony Vaio E series 17inch is making a lot of noise lately even though the cpu is at 2-5% Does anyone else have this?

I also would like to know if this is a problem.

Cheers

 

i've just installed a new windows on my vaio eb37. But i can't find any driver for the hotkey. I cant use my hotkey to change screen brightness right now. Anyone know where to download the driver ?

 

I have an NW350F which had been plugged into a Radio Shack AC/AC adapter by mistake. It still works fine. but the battery doesn't charge with the normal adapter. I'm trying to figure out what piece of hardware has to be fixed. Motherboard functions normally. Any ideas?

 

After i search on this forum, i got the answer :

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/222773-setting-utility-series-needed.html

 

Hi -

I'm looking for a instructions/guide (or just basic pointers) on the process for upgrading the Atheros AR9285 card (to anything else, but likely an Intel 6300).

Just need to know whether or not access is straightforward, or if I need to disassemble the beast to get to it.

Any/all pointers welcomed. Thanks!

 

Well, answered my own question (and here it is in case anyone else ever needs it).

Basically, remove every screw on the back panel (including the hard drive cover screws) except for the memory panel screws and off you go. Took just a minute to drop in the new Intel 6300 card; doubled the throughput vs. the AR9285 with our WNDR3700. Good times.

 

havent checked in on this forum for a while but I used to get totally fed up with the atheros card. total trash. used to randomly disconnect, poor connection, driver BSOD's and more, upped to the Intel 5100 (scrap piece lying around) and since then wifi has worked perfect. no problems at all. i guess yours would be better because the 6 series supports MIMO.

 

you may have busted the controler for the battery charging. if its an integrated chip (probably will be) then youre outta luck (you plugged in a random adaptor, come on) and should be checking for warranty.

otherwise you may find something by looking up the chipset manual for your motherboard and perhaps you have to just reset something. download an analysis program like HWinfo and look to see what your board is.

but its weird that something should actually go wrong because you'd expect to find surge, spike,and other electronical protection mechanisms on the charging controler. so fiddle around, with charging settings, maybe its just your windows settings or your battery is set to be charged up to a particular level like 50% (press the windows button, type vaio control center, power managerment, battery, uncheck the battery care function, see if it does something...)

 

Guys, I really need your BIOS! My friend's laptop is VPCEB4E1R but I can't find any BIOS to download on Europe support page! Can you help me out? Anyone has his BIOS file? Preferably EU model.

 

Hi ! I just got an e-series vaio as a replacement for my 5 year old laptop , also a sony , that had water spilled on it . I like it a lot , the screen though is far from being good .Desktop work , photos etc look okay , the videos however look disappointing compared to the x-black screen i had been accustomed to for the past five years . It is not crisp , i think i see a lot of artifacts mainly on dark colored areas , and the black parts are like they are 'moving' somehow ...also they appear illuminated and kind of grey

I tried to change settings from the nvidia control panel with moderate succes .
Could anyone post here the settings he uses ,both on "display" and "video" section of the nvidia panel ? It would do me a great favour . Thanks a lot!

 

Panel tech. It uses a TN panel, which is the cheapest kind (generally) avalible.

PVA panels are the only other panel capable of producing great black depths. Well... I take that back. OLED and well made TN panels can, too. But "premium" TN panels seem to be dying out in favor of IPS (very wide viewing angles). Not to say that they don't exist. Better equipped laptops like the Macbook (Air/Pro) do have decent panels with extremely high contrast ratios, too.

 

Whenever I adjust the lid of my EB, the screen flickers, and at some particular angle(about 60 degrees), it turns off. Well not exactly turns off, but it's like there is no light on the screen, and when I turn on a bright table lamp, I can see the faint outline of whatever I was doing on my laptop(windows, applications, desktop wallpaper, etc).

Could ravenperch shed some light on it? Is this problem because of a loose cable? Or what?

PS : My EB is more than an year old, and hence out of warranty.

 

I gotta say, I do like the aesthetics of my VPCEA for the most part, but I was, and still am disappointed that when I ordered a laptop labeled "matte black", the palm rest could not possibly be more glossy.

Anyway, my OCD and I have been looking at a few options to better match and finger print proof my laptop, and I stumbled upon this:
8" x 24" 20cm x 60cm 3D Texture CARBON FIBER Wrap VINYL Decal Sheet BLACK | eBay

I was wondering if anyone else thinks this would work and help make my matte black vpcea less of a finger print magnet, or if it's just a very dumb idea,
- Tyler

 

Hi everyone! I want to install AMD Catalyst 11.10 P3 on my vaio eb46 with 5650 (undervolted and underclocked ). Can anyone tell me how to install it?

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU124AMDCat1110PreDriverV3.aspx

 

Well, it's a direct link the the download so it should not need a web installer that would give your 5650 the boot. Try installing as per usual.

May I ask how exactly you have undervolted your 5650?

 

all 5650s in vaio are factory undervolted and underclocked.

 

It sounded like you were saying you controlled the voltage on your Vaio, my apologies.

That said, I know the factory clocks are slower on the Vaio's 5650 than on other laptops with the same gpu.

Unfortunately, while a new driver will bring certain optimization's for games, it will not boost the clock speeds to match other manufacturers 5650, however, if you use an AMD GPU clock tool and disable ATI's powerplay (needs disabling every time your about to change your clocks), then you can achieve the standard clock speed of other 5650's, and a little more if need be. Just remember you cannot alter the voltages, and you may not be so lucky when it comes to achieving maximum clock speed (I can run mostly stable with 600 engine and 900 memory, I keep it at 550/850 most of the time)

AMD GPU Clock Tool v0.9.26.0 For HD 5870 download from Guru3D.com

Have fun and expect a blue screen of death every now and again,
- Tyler

 

my wife have VAIO EB2 with Intel Core i3 350M 2260Mhz WXGA HD display Mobility Radeon HD 5650 with 1GB ram
I know these because I pay for it and I have the invoice

I want to buy her a 24" monitor. What is the maximul resolution on HDMI and what is max resolution on VGA adapter for this ATI RADEON ?

 

I havn't been doing much other than work on the laptop for the last 6 months or so, but currently enjoying Battlefield 3 and impressed how well the 5650 is coping, couple of settings on high, everything else on medium, blur (as i hate it) deferred AA and SSAO disabled.

Game looks great and runs very smoothly, had been thinking about getting a new laptop recently but as I am not that much of a pc gamer this made me realise its still fine for a while yet

 

This looks like a great idea and I was thinkin a while back to get one of them vinyl stickers on ebay, theyve got thousands and I was looking at one that said FBI lol. But cheap stuff and the one you likned here looks good, protective and because its textured, fingerprints wont be visible on it.

have you heard about brasso gadget care? amazing product for not just screens but any gadget.
Brasso Gadgetcare | The new gadget cleaning product by Brasso.co.uk

 

Has anyone else had problems with connecting their older Samsung LCD TVs (mine is a Syncmaster 711MP) to their VAIO E series over VGA? When I try to, the TV acts as if there is no cable connected.

I have tried 3 different VGA cables (all of which work with other laptops on the same TV). There's definitely not a broken VGA port on my VAIO or something because I can connect it to my other (also Samsung) LCD TV and it works perfectly! So, it seems that this is a specific problem between my laptop and one specific TV.

I have also tried restarting my computer (several times), messing with display settings (a lot!) including trying different screen resolutions, and the FN-F7 key, and updating everything.

I did some Googling and it seems that this was a problem with older VAIOs (about 5 years ago) and that Sony released a BIOS update which changed the pin layout on the VGA port and fixed the problem. This makes sense as the TV I'm trying to connect to is around 5 years old Seems they haven't incorporated this in their new models though :/

The annoying thing is that I cant even contact Sony about this via email because my VAIO is now out of warranty. I'm not paying 35p per minute on the phone, especially with my experience dealing with them in the past on the phone.

 

hello

i wanna know is that possible to change sony vaio VPCEA36FG's processor to i7 and 8Gb of ram?

 

8GB ram yes (slot on the bottom)

Processor no (not easily anyway - same goes for any laptop)

 

hey guys, i have a VPCEB 3C5E. same old ati 5650. though im technically competent, I really can't find anywhere the BIOS for this model or (class of models).

I want to overvolt the Madison gpu to 1V. There is no obvious way to extract the BIOS, and the vBIOS is obfuscated in the BIOS files somehow. I've seen that some guys have done this on the forum, so I'd appreciate a lot if you could point me.

Now I could simply add a +0.05V offset on the gpu vcc with a few BD transistors, but I'm worried about upsetting the internal Vrefs, and it's too damn crazy even for me.
10x.

 

Opened up my laptop this evening since its been getting pretty hot, it used to idle around 38oC and peak out around 68oC with a 580core 850mem oc, where as with my BF3 sessions recently its been hitting 82oc and idling about 50oc.

Initially thought I had wasted my time as the fan was clean, then I removed the heasink cover and..... it was completely blocked, was impossible to see from the outiside but it was just clogged with dust.

Quick clean up later all dust removed and was idling at 37oc after an hour of browsing, and peaked at 69oc after a couple of 64 player conquest maps, good times.

 

if you travel a lot and use your laptop in all sorts of places, it would be a good idea to open it up every two months or so. Or invest in a refillable compressed air can for the less technically inclined.
comfirm similar temperatures. The hottest i've ever seen it was 73C, but that was because it was on my lap.

By the way, did you know sony makes a 5000mAh battery packs for the EB now? that should give you roughly an extra 45min-1h battery life than the current ones they supply.

You can buy an i7-640 as long as your motherboard has a PGA988 socket. That i7 is a dual core though. I'm not sure if the i7-720 works with the HM55 chipset, but it has the same socket as the 640. Don't buy a second-gen i7, it's mechanically and electronically incompatible.

you can find those processors on ebay or some other rogue dealers, computer stores don't normally stock mobile cpus. The price is a premium, for a roughly 5% increase in performance, and your current cpu probably has little resale value.

your cpu, i5-560 is pretty damn powerful, and it makes little economical sense to upgrade to i7, unless you work in cryptography or compress lots of files daily. Quad core gets hot and i suspect it feels sluggish day-to-day because of the lower general freq. Most apps STILL don't take proper advantage of multicore CPUs, but they are getting better.
Upgrading the RAM is a simple business, i found a matched timing 4GB memory stick. that makes 6GB and i always have at least 30% free on a 64bit win7 (that's with 100 FF tabs, photoshop, illustrator, indesign and skyrim running in background just for the lulz of it.). Don't buy performance RAM for a laptop.

2GB ddr3 SODIMM has 0 resale value, so don't bother selling it.
If you can afford it, buy an SSD-huge impact. I've got an 128GB vertex II.

 

Hi there!

Would like to ask for some help.
I'm an owner of an Sony Vaio EB series notebook, but i have some problems(?).

I think the notebook have thermal problems, the fan is going allways on ~2800-3000 rpm, and the CPU's temperature is ~120 °F even when i'm not browsing or playing etc... on it.

Can you please tell me, is this normal and i'm getting just paranoid or not?

Notebook parameters:

CPU: i5 - 430M
GPU: ATI 5650 1GB
RAM: 4GB
OS: Windows 7 Home premium (Sony) Fresh reinstalled and the fan is cleaned too.

There is a screenshot about the values:

 

As others have been saying, get a can of compressed air, open up the laptop (literally just remove all the screws from the bottom and then pull the plate off) and blow all the dust out of the fan and heatsink.

Mine was idling at even higher temperatures than yours, the fan was on high all the time and the graphics card was hitting 95 celsius when overclocked and gaming, and now the fan isnt even on most of the time, and it's far, far cooler overall.

Oh and out of interest, how do you know what speed the fan is running at? I looked extensively for fan control software for my EB and couldn't even find one that could tell me the speed.

 

Thanks for the tip, but i don't want to loose the warranty by disassembling the notebook, i already blow the fan out through the airflow and tried to clean it.

So I hope there is another way to stabilize the fan speed.

I used to determine the fan speed AIDA64 software, there is "Cooling Fans" on the screenshot as you see.

 

Actually, check your bg software first. remove windows components, kill uneeded windows services (google: black viper windows 7 service). scan for malicious programs if yoou suspect anything of the sort.

sometimes, external hardware can jam the system really well. Check if your external drive is not overheating or not taking up too much system resources, USB mice are also infamous for not letting the PC go to sleep mode.

do a cmd-> "powercfg -energy" check before and after optimisations. idle CPU usage should be, well, less than 2%.

enable suspend states in the BIOS (c3/c6). Because of this, you may hear an annoying high pitched switching noise if you are young.

underclock your video card using ati gpu clock 0.9.26 or sapphire trixx. Since the CPU and GPU share the heatsink, the overall temp will go lower. ATI powerplay should kick in anyway, but this is perhaps for added peace of mind.

don't hold your laptop on your lap. (funny, no?)
buy a cooling pad, or if you work at a desk, even better, elevate it using a set of books, leaving the underside to extract its own fresh air. This will help you maintain a correct posture, too.

there is no way to see at first sight that a laptop hs been tampered with unless it has some kind of "warranty void if broken" seals. Which I've never seen on a laptop anyway.

EB series are VERY easy to take their back cover off, so go ahead and do it. there are 3 types of black screws. 2 thick ones near the battery, they hold a part of the hinges for the screen. under the battery there are some short ones. And the common black 2mm.
I didn't have a service manual when i first did it. Just make sure you take all into account, and make a drawing if you are worried you might loose one. Once the black plastic cover is off, you will have full access to the fan.
Don't force anything. If you do, you probably forgot to unscrew something or try sliding instead of pulling.

later edit Speaking of graphics drivers, here is the latest drivers for your vaio. No bs, it took a little googling arround for the wrong thing.
As a gamer on the go it gets you some 7+ fps for Skyrim and some for COD-type games.

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/920...mobile/11-1_mobility_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc.exe

Sony doesn't provide these, and if you download from the main AMD page you will be greeted with an incompatibility message.
Change 64 to 32 depending on win version or 10.8 for older versions. Don't bother with winXP.

 

This temperature is PERFECTLY normal. You have nothing to worry about. Besides, it depends on the ambient temperature. My EB idles at 53 degC, even after cleaning regularly, but then again, I'm from India, and the ambient temperature is well over 40 degC.

 

Hmm... intressting.
Can you check your CPU Fan speed please?!

Isnt your notebooks fan "noisy", or a little bit loud?

Its pretty annoying for me... but maybe i should just turn on some loud music and stop listening to the fan noise...

btw. im cleaning the notebook often too..

 

@fstorm my VAIO EB is a lot louder than my other HP dv3-3500 series, though the latter has a slightly less power-hungry cpu (t7350)

these are my idle temps

mobo:41
cpu 32
cpu#1 29
cpu#2 34
gpu chipset 35
gpu die 41
harddrive - n/a,ssd does not need a sensor
as you can see the CPU eats 5W without doing nothing. I'm pretty sure you can get it down to 2-3W if you run a simple OS, like Splashtop. I vividly remember getting a 3h+ battery life while browsing on it. My windows is geeked-out a bit, but that's still not enough.

But witout sounding alarmist, 49C is too much for idle. Ambient temperature does change things significantly. Mine were taken at a room temperature of 22.5C (Measured with a Maxim DS1621 9bit thermometer).

@CrazedMonk. Aren't you exaggerating? Colaba and Santacruz weather stations have record temps just barely over 40 during record hot days. We get record temperatures like that even in Europe. Now it may be hotter between concrete buildings, but please enlighten me how do you not melt in your homes then?

 

These temp numbers are starting to worry me, SpeedFan's claiming my CPU @ 62C, GPU@68C, SYSTEM@68C, anything to worry about?

 

If those figures are for anything but gaming then I would be worried, the GPU shouldn't be anywhere near 68oC unless running something which is stressing it.

EDIT: Actually I forgot you have a 5470 so I have no idea what the regular temps are for it, I have the 5650, sorry.

 

They're not anywhere near damaging temperatures, but the fan being on high gets annoying, and when you're gaming, they could creep up to being much higher.

Read back a few posts, you should definitely open it up and blow out the dust from the heatsink with some compressed air.

 

BTW, I have had my EB notebook with i3 CPU for about a year and things have changed a lot. The CPU temperature is 60C at idle and fan is always on, producing annoying whining sound. What's going on? I am thinking of opening mine for cleaning. I don't think I have installed any software that could cause this.

I also see the screen literally fall apart. Some kind of thin plastic gasket that aparently sits between the screen cover and the screen seems to have come out, and I can't put it back. I might post a picture. Very disappointing. It seems like Sony is losing its way.

Last week I picked up a Samsung Series 7 portable for $950 at BestBuy for a relative, and I was so surprised how much better it is than Sony. I can easily 4-5 hour battery life time. Ultra bright screen. Very thin and light construction. Slick brushed metal finish Practically no noise coming out. Intel i7 with AMD Radeon HD6490. It's just almost shocking how much better it is than a Sony. I would take that Samsung over an Apple that costs twice as much. It's almost equal to Apple MacBook Pro that costs $1800.

 

It seems like you have provided a link to drivers that are 10 releases old. Shouldn't it be https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/920...obile/11-11_mobility_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc.exe ?

Note the version number in the file name.

 

This has been oft-discussed in the F-series thread. Just the slightest film of dust on the exhaust vents will cause the temperature to rise dramatically. My own F11 needs cleaning every two months due to having five cats. Taking these things apart is easy, and it will NOT void the warranty! But it is the only way to remove the dust properly and get the temps down.

 

Your F11 has 5 cats? Wow!

I'd agree with that though, you don't actually realize what a difference there is until you blow out all the dust and see how much cooler it runs. Do you use compressed air too then?

 

Just a fine brush and lung power. I can get right to the vent once the bottom has been removed.

Should have said, "...due to MY having five cats."

 

do i need to reapply thermal paste?

 

I didn't, and my temps are like they were when I got the laptop now i've removed all the dust. So i'd say no, not yet anyway.