Official VAIO FW Series Owners Thread

Oh boy... where is the Run menu on Vista ??

EDIT -- Found it.

 

@soundsGood,

i will have to get used to Vista also but you might check the software forum and refer to the Vista Tweaks guide. Did you turn off Indexing service - that can cause disk thrashing -0 at least it did in XP.

Gary

 

i thought the noise from burning recovery dvds was from the optical drive or something. it originated from the right side, the fan should be on the left near left vent no?

 

Thanks !

 

Actually, you're right. The noise came from the drive. Duh.

 

is the Hi-Color that much better than the Eco?

 

@SoundgGood,

TetonWorlf gave following advice regarding how he set his HiColor screen. You may try this.

Right click the desktop and run ATI Catalyst. Select Advanced Settings. In the Color section, set your gamma/brightness/contrast and press Apply and then exit ATI Catalyst.

Now go to Control Panel->VAIO Control Center->Display->Video&Photo Color Setting and uncheck Enable the Photo Color Setting and press Apply. It will ask you to restart the system. When the system reboots it will remember your ATI settings instead of overriding them with Sony settings. Now you can tweak the ATI settings as desired.

I use the following ATI color settings for my HiColor screen to give very nice black/grey levels and purer whites:
Red Gamma 0.95
Red Brightness -20
Blue Gamma 0.95
Blue Brightness -20
Green Gamma 0.95
Green Brightness -35
Note, I found overactive Green causing dingy whites, greys, and blacks. So I set Green lower than Red/Blue to give a better white balance. I've had to do the exact same thing when calibrating my HDTVs. Try it, you'll like it.

You may not want to decrease overall brightness as much as I did...just try to keep the color balance so that Green is lower than Red/Blue. In any event, screens can vary so YMMV

Gary

 

its not even close

 

Would it be possible to send in my FW160D with Eco to get it replaced with a Hi Color?

 

That's what I used and it worked perfectly...no damage to the finish since it is citrus-based. Just wipe it with damp cloth when you are done.

 

I have since changed Green Brightness to -32 and dropped overall brightness with Keyboard Control (and Power Management setting) to one notch down. YMMV.

 

It was one of the first things I did. Thanks.

Speaking of overall brightness...

The Fn +/- Brightness setting does not seem to "Save" itself. For example, if I knock it down one notch (which is where I think I like it best) it resets back to full brightness after each re-boot. Anyone know how to lock this setting?

 

You need to set brightness in the Power Management settings for the scheme you are using (I use VAIO Optimized) and then save it (do it for both plugged in and battery modes). Power Management settings are accessible from the battery icon in your task tray. The reason you need to do this is that everytime you reboot, come out of sleep, or come out of hibernate, the brightness is reset to the setting in your selected power scheme.

Note, if you set things up the way I described in my other post, the ATI Color settings (including the ATI brightness setting...which is a different "brightness" than you set by Fn +/-) will not be reset by Power Management scheme but is "sticky".

 

Beautiful. Thank you, Mr. Wolf.

 

SoundsGood, can you do me a favor? Open ATI Catalyst Control Center and look at the AVivo settings and list the factory settings for Brightness, Saturation, Contrast, et. al....I reset mine to Default (which just zeros them) and have now lost the factory defaults setup by Sony. Thanks. BTW, the AVivo settings are for video (like DVD) and not for regular screen graphics.

 

Thank you for the reply. I thought those electrical engineers in Intel make the spec for some reason. Over the spec may burn the CPU, but under the spec may made the CPU stop running temporary which require reboot. If the component like GPU or DVD player drawing much more current "once and a while", then those capacitors which are used for reserving energy for CPU will suddenly not enough voltage. It is because user has tune down the minimum acceptable range of voltage. The GHz CPU may stop in millisecond which is enough to stop the whole system. If the bank or planes tell the customers that all their computer system are undervolt, does the customers willing to deposit the money to that bank or take that flight?

I do not know enough knowledge of computer, but for calculating ton of data, I would rather using a clusters system, but it is too expensive and users cannot bring that kind of heavy computer to libray or travel!

As long as Sony is as "stable and same kind of noise" as their Pentium II notebook. It is good enough. Pentium II notebook is most noisy in Sony line but it is acceptable. Not like those high frequency noise.

Thank you.

 

Sure thing...

Brightness: -13
Saturation: 110
Contrast: 114
Tint: 0.00

Color vibrance: 0
Flesh tone correction: 0

 

here's what happened to me. I did change the gamma, brightness etc in ATI panel. I aslo unchecked the 'Enable the Photo Color Setting'. did restart. so far so good.

My wife calls me that afternoon and says that the fn keys for brightness control are not working. So i went ahead and put all the ati values back to default. put the check mark again in 'Enable the Photo Color Setting'. did restart. the fn f5/f6 keys started functioning. so far so good.

But then after 2 days the fn-f5/f6 again stopped funtioning. I had not touched the ATI panel. I do a restart and they start funtionaing again. Yesterday, they again stopped functioning. I have not tried restarting but my hunch is that it might get temporarily fixed. not sure whats happening. I am having to go through the power management option to change it now. That works fine. I guess I can go through ATI panel but I am not touching it for now.

Anyone experienced this? any simple solution? If not, then I think I will just assume the fn key was never there and use other methods to increase-decrease brightness. nothing really more than a small annoyance. its not like i change brightness very often. On the positive side, I get to tweak gamma etc.

Soundsgood, Tetonwolf and others who have tweaked parameters in the ati panel, does fn-f5/f6 not work for you? Is that the designed behavior?

 

It does work for me, even after the tweak. Note that this is only my first day using the FW.

 

hi guys

looks like this is the laptop im buying, decided on it feels good to make the switch away from HP after all these years

couple questions

1. are there any sales on FW's going on anywhere? coupons i can use?
2. any known compromising problems?
3. is hi-color worth it vs. the eco screen?


thanks in advance!

 

Ha...You did the exact same mistake as I.
After spending 30 min at best buy...copying all this specs,
I know them by heart...or almost .
Suprised to see that the hicolor calibration is the exact same thing as the eco.
And by the way...do you know if the factory settings by Ati changed anything else...I only noticed one other difference with all of the options. There was a checked box somewhere that wasn't supposed to be by the sony settings but don't remember where....if that can help...

 

Hey,

Well I bought FW139E/H and thought I was happy with it till I realized that I could not get the Atheros 928x card to recongnize the N-draft network and I did not get the one with Blue Ray....So after I configured the computer and spent countless hours with a level 2 tech at SOny I decided to trade it in for a higher model and said mine was defective.

So I traded it in for the FW170 j/w thinking that the intel 5100 card would be better suited for the Ndraft network and I also got 64 bit Vista and more Space on the hard-drive....

I like the newlook-(white better)-but realized now that the 139e/h might have been better to start with...I really have buyers remorse and feel that I should have waited for the patch and could have gotten the Atheros card latter on to use the N-draft network....I also wish I had the ATI Radeon card instead of the integrated one...
Please someone convince me that I did the right thing and got the 170. They did not have the 190eeh there so that was not a option..
Ohh and I got the 5100agn card finally to use the N wireless and get 135mbps right now....

Need some assurance and some feedback on what I should do>?

 

The fn f5/f6 keys always have worked but as soon as you reboot, sleep, or hibernate the brightness goes back to what is set in your power profile....so fn keys are just for temporary changes...to make it permanent you must change the power profile.

 

Thanks buddy.

 

Heh, yeah it would be nice if "default" meant "factory" instead of "zero".
Not sure about your other questions.

 

According to the Sony Style website:

"Estimated Battery Life: Up to 6 hours (standard capacity battery) Up to 8 hours (large capacity battery)"

Does this sound realistic to anyone here?

 

not even close, way less than half of that...I get approx 2 hrs 15 minutes on standard

 

I get about 2 hours and 30 minutes with the High Performance profile and Wireless on.

 

Is anyone using the large capacity battery?

 

Do you guys leave your fw plugged into the wall 24/7? Will doing that kill my battery?

 

Not necessarily. Having your notebook plugged-in to an outlet for a long time won't have any impact.

 

I'm trying to decide between the Lenovo T400 and Sony FW190. They're pretty much the same configurations and price. While I like the FW series design and build-quality, the T400 has several advantages in this case:

ATI Mobility Radeon 3650 with 256MB
4 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM)
Intel WiFi Link 5300 (AGN)
Integrated Wireless Wide Area Network

Will Sony ever include such options in the next few months? It's really hard to decide right now.

These are very new specifications. I don't understand why Sony never included this in their new FW series.

 

I just got my laptop from Newegg too, 250 drive instead of 200 ... is there anyway to verify that it does have the Hi-Color screen at least? I've never had a good screen so I'm not quite sure hahaha

 

i heard that old-wives-tale as well, but thats all it is

 

Same exact boat as you, except I need to decide between T400 vs FW vs SR vs Z... and I need to decide by friday/saturday :|

 

Personally, I find Lenovo's designs to be /butt-ugly/, stuck in the 1990s, boring bricks. And I you really gonna need WWAN?

I DONT GET WHY EVERYBODY'S OBSESSING ABOUT DDR3 - Performance benefits are MARGINAL, power savings are MARGINAL, price differences EXTRAORDINARY.

With the 3650 you might get less battery life.

 

agreed, man. thinkpads are just so archaic looking....and they still have the red-nub finger pointer....

for the price i want something like dells business laptops like the latitude

 

Anyone care to cherp in about the fw I got? I mean would it be better to keep this one the 170jw or try and return it again or should i be happy with this one...Again i had the 139 eh to begin with and got BestBuy to take it back.

Just need some reasurrance...I would love to rather have the 190eeh but they dont carry that one in the store...So is this best Fw they got for me right now?

 

This is the post by the way that I was talking about Under here

 

can someone point me in the right direction in regards to the hi-color screen? is it worth the upgrade?

right now my options are an eco screen for 1150, no tax no shipping, or buying a hi-color retail (so add like 100 on top of) 1200

$150 upgrade worth it?

 

Absolutely, 100% yes it is worth it.

 

all i needed to know

 

I've killed several batteries on my work laptops from basically never cycling the batteries - i.e. leaving them plugged in 100% of the time and never discharging them before charging them again.

So, in my experience, it's not just an old wive's tale.

 

I politely beg to differ.

The Thinkpad design may be old, but it's a classic. You can't deny it looks professional and some of the features add greatly to their durability - like the double latches and the 'rim' around the screen to spread the impact of any knocks over the whole laptop. It's built to last, not just archaic.

And the 'red-nub finger pointer' is infinitely better than any touchpad, if you use it properly and you get some practice. Not having to move your fingers off the keyboard to use the pointer is an absolutely fantastic idea and much quicker and easier, once you're used to it. I'm sorry that my Z won't be coming with a TrackPoint (or a ThinkLight, for that matter)!

 

I think so too. Apple recommends once a month. I think once every two months is good enough. What do you think Infy?

 

Some Mark tests for HDD and GPU on FW

This is for anybody wondering about the Hitachi HTS542525K9a, serial ATA disc with 250 GB in the Sony FW's. Recommendation by notebook check:

This "belongs to the average speed notebook hard discs. Where the hard disc performance is particularly important, it is advisable to exchange the Hitachi with a quicker HDD - model."

HD Tune: Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00 Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum: 29.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum: 59.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average: 47.4 MB/sec
Access Time: 19.6 ms
Burst Rate: 77.7 MB/sec
CPU Usage: 3.0 %

Also included were benchmarks from PCMark 05 / 3DMark 05 for the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 - 256 MB, Core: 680 MHz, Memory: 800 MHz, GDDR3 card:

PCMark 05
4865 points
in comparison
Asus Eee PC 701 4G (RM miniBook) (min) 855
...
Sony Vaio VGN-SZ61WN/C T7500, GeForce 8400M GS 4845
Fujitsu-Siemens H240 T7200, Mobility FireGl V5200 4857
Samsung X60 Pro Boxxer T7400, Mobility Radeon X1700 4859
Sony Vaio VGN-FW11M P8400, Mobility Radeon HD 3470 4865
Lenovo Thinkpad T61 T7300, Quadro NVS 140M 4989
Dell M90 T7200, Quadro FX 1500M 5006
Dell XPS M1730 T7500, GeForce 8700M GT SLI 5017
...
Alienware Area-51 m15x (max) 7669

3DMark 05
4865 points
in comparison
Zepto Notus A12 (min) 208
...
Asus G2Pc T7400, Mobility Radeon X1700 4396
Sony Vaio VGN-FZ31Z.G4 T8300, GeForce 8600M GS 4732
Samsung NP-R70 T7100, GeForce 8600M GS 4765
Sony Vaio VGN-FW11M P8400, Mobility Radeon HD 3470 4865
Samsung X65 Bekumar T7500, GeForce 8600M GS 4894
Sony Vaio VGN-AR11S T2500, GeForce Go 7600 GT 4918
Acer Aspire 5920G T7300, GeForce 8600M GT 5111
...
Alienware Area-51 m15x (max) 15805

All of the above tests were taken from the new notebook check review HERE

 

I agree that's probably sufficient, but I need to do it more often than every three months or I'd forget (my short term memory isn't too great nowadays).

With my new-ish Tosh Sat Pro U300, I use it on batteries until it turns off about once a month or so. I'm not scientific about it, so sometimes it'll be two or three times a month. So far (after about 10 months) it still seems to be lasting as well as when I first got it: around 3 hours (low brightness, wireless on, office/web usage). But then again I haven't bothered timing it or anything as it's only my work laptop.

 

Would it be possible to send in my FW160D (Eco screen) to Sony to get the screen replaced with a Hi Color?

 

Nope. You will be better off returning it and buying a model (or CTO maybe) with HiColor.

 

Can I return it even if there's nothing wrong with it though? I bought it 2 weeks ago instore.

(I say there's nothing wrong with it... the wireless is messed up, is that reason enough to return it?)