Official VAIO SR Series Owners Thread

w00t w00ttttt Order shipped today, hope this was worth it over the lenovo T400, we will see.

 

Bought an SR129E after my Dell Inspiron 710m and m1210 crapped out. Only thing I don't like about the VAIO are the speakers and I can imagine the extended batteries being very expensive judging from how much the standard SR battery cost.

According to the spec sheet the model number for the large capacity battery is VGP-BPL13 yet the sonystyle website doesn't list the SR as a compatible notebook for the battery. Does anyone know if that battery will actually work with the SR?

 

I may finally hit the 'buy' button today on the SR..!

 

Is dropping connections a problem with the atheros in the sr or is it just a one of case as reported by somebody in this forum?

 

It is just one case I believe. I have never had my connection dropped yet. Of course, I seem to sit pretty close to the routers that I use, but eh.

Even walking around my campus though, switching from router to router, I didn't see any drop. I have also updated the driver to the newest for this particular card, and it does take care of the random lag spikes that would occur with online games.

 

so i take it youre keeping it then?

i've read about flex in the palm rest... is it very severe?

 

Yes I'm keeping it, I love it. The flex is no big deal its minor. I didn't notice till people pointed it out.

I only regret not waiting 1 month to order...but whatever, its done and at least i have my laptop ready for school. i leave next week anyway, so its kind of a good thing i got it earlier.

 

why do you say that? cuz of promotions?

 

seriously? is the lag spike in online games bad enough for you to notice it?

 

Yeah... but actually, it might not be that bad on Cable/DSL/Dial-up. I am stuck with satellite, so anything that lags in terms of hardware gets magnified like 80 times worse because the internet itself lags.

The new driver really took care of it for the most part. But now my torrent traffic seems to dip down and slow down randomly, but then climb back up again. I don't know if it's my school's network or not, but I can't check at home (See internet I have above). xD

 

wait has someone found a fix for the battery drain issue...
or is everyone simply just shrugging off that problem?

can anyone using windows XP on their SR confirm that they still suffer from the battery drain probleM?

 

I'm wondering about the same thing.
anybody?

 

what is bugging me though is that there seems to be no inherent problems with the battery being to hold charge for the specified duration of time...when the laptop is left on.

e.g if it says 45%, 1hr20mins, its actually able to power the laptop on for that long despite it being unable to hold charge when switched off or in standby mode.

the big problem here is that that 7% lost during bootup or from the infamous battery drain problem, it could potentially power the laptop on for another half and hour or even more.

 

When I close the lid while downloading I noticed that the download speeds drop to a point where I couldn't download a 60MB file in two hours. I tried this with torrents and the same thing happens. Is there a way to turn off this feature? I have the Atheros wireless card.

 

in the other sr battery drain thread, someone mentioned that although the battery indicator would show a drop in %, the actual time that was left was unchanged ie. the battery didnt actually drain and held the same charge but the battery indicator was wrong.

is that the same for you?

 

Did anyone contact sony and make them sure battery drain is not a problem of batterym but prob. of laptop itself/indicator?

I could not contact local sony because I have to own VAIO to reach the support (I need serial No. e.t.c.)

To me the problem is in:
1. I can't predict how much time I can be online after turning it on. (That's bad, since my working abilities must be predictable)
2. If I leave VAIO for a week and then I will need to run and take computer with me - It won't even power on. No matter if battery actually 100% charged and tat was just a sensor fault.

Please make sony know about the problem

 

i',m really wanting to buy this but these issues are holding me back.

arseni, do you have a vaio or are these your questions? anyhow i have the same questions and hopefully someone with one can answer.

maybe people arnt bothered by this cos i would be calling sony and asking and if everyone else does, then something may be done about it

 

same problem here !!! any solution !! ??
may the problem coz the wirless antena in the screen and when we colsed it , it will be very slow coz of the signal ???

 

I called stupid sony support and they will send me new battery !!! waiting

 

This may be a stupid question, but it's not that the laptop is going to standby when you close the lid, is it?

 

How's the webcam on the SR? Image quality?

 

Here is a picture I took with the SR image camera thing.

Sometimes it'll even adjust itself if you use face searching and it'll zoom into your face. Kinda nice.

Well, this isn't exactly a great picture, but I can try to see if I have a better one.

 

Well, I made another trip to the Sony Store in Vancouver (Pacific Center) this time to see if they had a Z on display and they didn't, but they did have the pink, silver, and black SR models all on display. It was nice to compare the silver and black models of this machine. I actually think the silver one looks a bit better, as the black model was only really black on the top of the lid. The rest of the machine looked like a dark navy blue/dark grey/ colour to me.

The bilingual keyboard that will ship on all Canadian Vaio SR laptops is very ugly. It has an extra Function key on it for all of the french hyphens and symbols and all of these are pink. Yes, that's right, pink. The symbols on the keys look very cluttered as a result. I'm sure for French speaking Canadians this keyboard is a dream come true, but for the rest of us, it's quite the opposite. With this said, the keyboard was very comfortable to type on.

On a positive note, the display was very thin and the colours were vivid and bright. This is definitely one of the most beautiful 13" laptop displays that I have ever seen.

 

Thanks
Can you tell me if Lenovo's VeriFace works on the SR - some Toshiba, Sony, and HP users have reported it working...

----------------
Now playing: Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
via FoxyTunes

 

Sure. xP

Uhm, I'm not sure. I haven't even bothered to try. Is there some place where you can download that?

I dunno if it'll work though. XD

 

I just received my VAIO this afternoon.

Vista Home Premium 32bit
Intel Dual-Core P8400 2.26GHz
Intel GMA M4700 IGP
3GB RAM

I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to essentially make a clean install on my laptop without having to acquire a disc of Vista Home Premium and using my own product code. As I understand it, the laptop's VAIO Recovery Center's "Make a Recovery Disc" option just restores it to state it was shipped to me - bloatware and all (if I'm mistaken, please correct me!). Something as rudimentary as a list of applications to install would work as well.

Loving this laptop at the moment. Feels solid, the keyboard is great once you've gotten used to it (I think I make less typos on it than my desktop keyboard), and the battery life with the integrated graphics option is astounding (I might make 5 hours with WiFi on, bluetooth off, doing simple things like web-browsing). Completely satisfied...for now.

 

Congrats !!

do you have battery drain in your laptop ( the laptops drain battery while it's turn off)???

this problem will make me crazy !!!

 

Haven't tested that out yet (with fully charging it, taking it out, and then putting it back in 24 hours later). I don't expect I'll be able to, actually, seeing as I move into my dormitory tomorrow and will need to use this thing somewhat often.

But with Power-Saver mode, WiFi on, Bluetooth off, browsing the web the entire time with the exception of closing the lid a few times when called away and watching 10 minutes of a DVD to test my CD/DVD drive, my battery went from 100% to 10% in about 4:30.

 

does anybody know how i can delete the partition that was reserved for recovery after i make my own recovery disks? the partition seems to be hidden since you cant see it in "my computer" next to c:

 

What's everyone screen refresh rate? I checked under display settings and I was on 59 hertz. Seems kinda wierd? It did offer me another option of 60 hertz though. Should I change to that?

 

mine is 60 hertz

 

I have the discrete video and the only option is 60 Hz. I've seen this before on other machines and it doesn't seem to do much. Some displays will go even lower in refresh rate to safe a bit of power, but 1 Hz isn't going to do much.

 

Can somebody tell me at what temperature the FAN kicks in when the SR is in silent mode?

I just got my Z and I have observed that the fan turns on when the CPU temp is above 45 degrees C. I would be curious to know when the SR fan turns on.

I'm using coretemp to measure the temperature. I know that other apps such as rmclock give a different temp reading so to keep things consistent, please use the coretemp app.

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/


Thanks!

 

I made sure it does nothing when the lid is closed (screen only turns off), I just find it a bit weird that my download slows to a crawl but it's nothing major.

 

When ACPI reaches 45C, the fan will start turning on. I sometimes hear my fan die down and ramp back up around 35-40C. I can't test it now because my fans are always in silent mode, because my room is freezing. I idle at 26C O_O!

 

Thanks, thats exactly the behavior I see with the Sony Z as well.

 

Does anyone else have a high pitched buzzing/tinny sound coming out of the left side speaker (or sounds like it's actually from another component vibrating near to the left side speaker) when using the speakers at moderate to high volumes? It's driving me nuts, but honestly I don't plan on using the speakers very often so this isn't a huge deal.

Someone had posted a photo of the SR with the keyboard removed and I was considering taking the keyboard off to take a look inside, perhaps a screw isn't as tight as it ought to be and is allowing a component to rattle a bit more than intended. Would this void my warranty? If not, can I ask the member who did that to provide info on which screws I need to remove to take a look inside? My guess would be the 2 closest to the edges by the hinge (not on the hinge itself).

Other than that, no complaints here - lovely little notebook! My first experience with Vista, and had expected the worst, but I think I have it running very well after tweaking according to Black Viper's guide and disabling all unnecessary services/programs/bloat.

 

Remove the screws marked in blue. Flip the machine over, open the display to expose the keyboard then slide the keyboard (push on the thin strip of plastic above the CD tray and near the rubber bumper) to the left to unlock the keyboard. Have fun.

 

Can anyone give me a link to this guide i am very interested

 

Try google... it's your friend.

 

Thanks very much! Did you figure this out yourself, or had you found some sort of guide? Maybe I'll give it a shot.

 

No guide, I'm just a curious guy.

 

Hey guys, i just recently bought my Sony Vaio SR and kinda have a problem....

first day i turned on the laptop i had 202GB out of 223GB on my hard drive...i transferred some of my files from my old laptop and installed some programs and ended up with around 165GB left.....everyday my hard drive goes down like 1-2GB for no reason....and now im down to 150GB...whats wrong?

This happened on my Toshiba laptop too....so im guessing its a vista problem? or something wrong with hard drive...I tried defraging and disk cleanup, but didnt do much...

 

Yaiks, that is weird.

I am getting the SR for my sister tomorrrow. I checked it out at the Sony Style store and when i tried it reboot it, it took a long long time, probably due to the 1gb ram inside, will buy another piece of 2gb.

How is the boot up time? Really slow or is it due to the bloatware?

Thank you.

 

Does anybody know any good ways to get rid of the crapwares?
They are getting on my nerve

 

I just got my SR from the Canadian SonyStyle and it does not have a bilingual keyboard if any Canadians are wondering, here is a picture:

 

whis isnt there a centrino duo sticker on the SR but only the plain centrino one?

 

It is a Centrino 2 sticker it just got cut off in the picture.

 

my SR came with the plain Centrino sticker (although sony's official website states the model to have centrino2

 

1. The hard drive will never have all 250GB. And, there is probably a hidden restore portion taking up some space.

See this for hard drive space info: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc...TEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1zaXpl&p_li=&p_topview=1

2. Are you installing a lot of programs? It could be that System Restore is making restore points.