Official VAIO Z Core 2 Duo Series Owners Thread

Maybe Sony had a built-in device in all their Vaios (no matter what model) to constantly check for non-Sony batteries? You know... Sony can be a bit anal in "pirated" stuff....

 

Check out tumi, I have a bag from them that has a suspended compartment seperated from everything else in the bag, also helps with hard drives too.

 

You'll have to pay import duty too, which is around 4% I think.

S

 

You can just swap out the processor?

I guess that one's just not available boxed yet.

S

 

I finally received my Z today. I'm currently doing a full image backup of the original hard drive onto an external, in case I decide to ever sell it.

Too bad it'll take another 1.5 hours. :\

 

Much quicker is to make the backup to the same HDD and after that copy it to external one. It took less than 20 minutes for me.

 

Thanks for the tip but it won't let me do it to the same partition being backed up. Perhaps the only way is to make another partition and back it up there.

I wish the Sony had a 1 click complete factory restore like the Dell's,...or does it?

 

Ah I thought you're making backup with some 3D party software. A made it with Acronis, which is able to save it to the same partition....

 

OK, first impressions:

- nice packaging, good workmanship on the laptop no physical defects

- screen has a bit of backlight bleeding at the top and bottom, but compared to my Dell, it is nothing

- the bloatware + 160gb 5400rpm drive = extremely slow initially (compared to my ssd, more than triple boot time)

 

(About the battery drain)

It's a corporate explanation. Admitting to a flaw opens for liability (and immediate attack from class action lawsuit lawyers in California). No company will risk that these days. Even support staff is trained to never, under any circumstance, admit to faults.

 

are you able to make an image back up of the Vaio partition? It's EISA and I thought it wasn't possible to make an image back up of it to put on another hard drive? I hope I'm wrong...i would like to do the same with mine.

I'm thinking of changing my configuration to cancel to SSD and replace with a 5400rpm HDD. It's an Ultra ATA SSD with that interface fixed to my motherboard, its going to seriously limit me for future SATA SSD's coming out this year.

Is that right? the interface for the hard disk is fixed to the motherboard, therfor you cant upgrade from UltraATA(PATA) to SATA? I'm not a 100% sure, your opinions appreciated...

 

Then my tech support guy from the Phillipines was not trained very well. I've called them multiple times to try and work out my wireless issues (WLAN) and 1 guy told me that this was a known issue and that Sony is currently working on a fix. It's pretty frustrating since my 4 yr. old Toshiba Satellite has never had a problem connecting and maintaining the connection. Neither did my Z 590 for that matter.

 

I gave up on the backing up idea, but it is certainly possible to do a whole drive image with Acronis Trueimage onto an external drive.

What laptop have you ordered? The Z is SATA-II. I highly doubt there are any PATA being produced for over a year now. I do recommend that you get the SSD elseware though. Newegg currently has the new OCZ 120gb SSD drives for ~$220.

 

I would imagine so. True Image and similar programs do a bit-by-bit copy of the disk, as far as I know -- can't imagine how something could foil that.

 

It does a copy of the partitions, not the disk. The partition image won't necessarily be restored to the same exact place on the disk, and with an EFI boot partition and a different offset, that is vital. In practice, you won't be able to restore the restore partition to working order with Acronis True Image.

One easy way to get a true copy of the disk is to boot from a linux CD/DVD/USB-fob and do a dd copy:

backup:

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 | gzip -3 | ssh remote "cat >backup.gz"

restore:

Code:

ssh remote "cat backup.gz" | gzip -d | dd of=/dev/sda bs=512

 

I just got back from the Sony style retail store, got the advantage of comparing them side by side.

I compared the 1600 x 900 specifically with the 1366 x 768 side by side. Here are my thoughts.

Everything looks identical beginning from the desktop and the start menu. Mouse pointer, icons, everything looked exactly the same. If I didn't know which was which I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

The difference came only in Firefox from what I observed. When you search something in Google, the 1600 x 900 is over half of one result-to-one result, longer vertically. To reconcile for this, however, everything looks very tiny. In full screen mode if you go to Sonystyle.com, or any other site for example, the middle body of the site is scrunched, making a lot of excessive amount of frame space on the left and right sides (in comparison), whereas in the 1366 x 768 resolution, it stretches out almost all the way like my desktop so there isn't much of that excess border. The 1600 x 900 resolution sacrifices side lengths and text in order to get a few some lines up and down.

The 1600 x 900 is certainly better for windowed internet browsing since when it is in windowed mode, you can resize the window to remove the left and right borders, but for full screen browsing I prefer the 1366 x 768.

My computer and windows folders looked almost identical.

I tested MS Excel Spreadsheet 2007 on both of them. The 1366 x 768 actually gets one more cell in vertically than the 1600 x 900 (so say if the 1600 stops at G, the 1366 stops at H) and they are identical horizontally, which is why I mentioned I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference of resolutions if I didn't know beforehand. Based on the excel spreadsheet, I would have thought the 1600 x 900 was actually the 1366 x 768 and the 1366 x 768 was the 1600 x 900.

I also tested MS Word 2007, which they were exactly the same. There wasn't much else to test, so I couldn't try any games, movies or anything else.

 

Ty for the review. I agree with your impressions. We are talking about a 13" screen right?

Windows 7 and reductions in ssd price will make this Z a real jewel in summer.

Paul

 

Given your description, most likely someone had set the DPI to 120 instead of the default 96 on the 1600x900 model to make text on the desktop larger...

 

I assumed they were stock since everything was factory-ish, even the touchpads were default slow, but I'm willing to go back tomorrow (or maybe even right now if I feel up to it) if you want me to acknowledge the settings or make any changes. What changes should I make?

 

That would be great. I would like to hear your impressions.....

 

Sure, I will make it a more thorough review if you have suggestions on what you want me to run and test out, and what settings you want me to change them to (if there is such a thing).

I don't think I can run any downloaded apps because when I tried downloading and running cpuz, there was a password and/or fingerprint scanner that need authorization.

 

right click on desktop, click on personalize, on the left side there should be a button for "adjust font DPI", then set it back to default

the default 1600 should be quite a bit smaller than 1366, i know because i've worked with both resolutions

 

Wow everything is huge on my 22" desktop, even on the smallest resolution. I'm almost sure this wasn't the DPI used, but just in case it was I'll go back, probably tomorrow though since I need more time to research the models.

Actually at 2000 ~ resolution it looks normal.

 

When does the Z640 CTO become available? I thought someone said something about Feb.15.

 

I'm pretty sure they adjusted the DPI.

Someone already posted pictures of 2 Z's size by side with different resolutions. the higher res Z CLEARLY showed MUCH more information on the screen (with or without firefox/iexplore/chrome), and the size of windows icons, task bar, etc were also smaller when compared with the lower res Z.


Someone with loads of time can definitely go search through the pages in this thread and dig it out..

 

Did a little thread search and found it:

http://kunkoku.livedoor.biz/archives/51484778.html

If you scroll down a bit. You can clearly see that the higher res Z shows the excel spreadsheet all the way to column V, where the lower res Z only shows it to R. The higher res Z also shows to 41 rows as oppose to 34 on the other Z.

If you scroll down farther. You can also see that the task bar and the windows widgets are marginally thinner on the higher res Z.


I'm not saying which one is better (but as you can tell, I do prefer the higher res one). It all depends on your eye sight and what kind of stuff you do on your laptop. But the higher res Z DOES show more stuff in theory and also in reality.

 

Yeah, another link:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=3678441&postcount=4

 

What do you mean? Screen resolution?

S

 

I don't believe that is correct. The Z590 lists the SSD as Ultra ATA and the Z690 lists the SSD as SATA. I'd love to see data transfer speed comparisons between these 2 to see how much difference there is.

 

this is exactly the information im looking for! My Vaio is being built and it clearly states Ultra ATA SSD, so is that PATA?

I dont want it if replacing with a SATA-II SSD in the future is not possible, I would rather change my order now to a HDD and purchase the Intel X25 or OCZ Apex and install myself.

 

The hard drive is definitely SATA-II. This is what mine came with:
http://www.toshibastorage.com/main....dDiskDrives/MK1652GSX/MK1652GSXSpecifications

 

Well, the DPI should be set to whatever the DPI on the display is, so fonts and scalable widgets can scale to an apparent similar size.
The Z590 has a 140 DPI display, and the Z540 has a 120 DPI display. Neither should be set to 96 DPI.

If you want smaller fonts in either resolution, just adjust the font size, and you get more to fit on the screen. And if you think the borders or icons are too big, well, adjust them in Windows' preferences! Don't do it the lazy way by setting the DPI to a too small value!

The 1600x900 wins in terms of how crisp the fonts and scalable widgets look -- a 10 pt scalable font on a 1600x900 display is always going to look better than a 10 pt font on a 1366x768 display. There's ~40% more pixels per character. But they should appear exactly the same size -- else your OS isn't configured correctly.

The price you pay are that bitmap fonts and non-scalable widgets and images will just look smaller. A 4x6 raster font, for example, is unreadable flyspeck on the 1600x900 screen, and most images on the web will be smaller too.
And some badly designed programs don't work with anything except Windows "small fonts" (i.e. 75 dpi on older Windows versions and 96 dpi on newer Windows versions). The main symptom is that text disappears outside non-scalable windows, or buttons aren't big enough to hold the text in them. But that's because of programmers who haven't followed the GUI guidelines which are quite specific on not assuming a font size, or mixing non-scalable and scalable elements in a non-portable way. Since they're ill-written programs, just ditch them.

 

So I guess I'm the stupidest guy in the world. I always thought that for most "native resolution" views, the screen resolution should be set to native & the DPI set to the default value, no?

 

Woah woah, so... if you ordered the sony Z with a SSD it was PATA, but if you ordered the hard drive it was SATA? wha?

 

So what does this mean? Should I do a comparison on the DPI?

I'm at the Sony style store right now, the 1600 x 900 screen was at 120 DPI or 140, or w/e I can't check anymore because of the lock. But I set it back to 96, there is certainly a difference.

Everything is really small, though I don't think that it should come as a surprise. I really wish they had chairs here so I don't have to stand up, because using the 1600 x 900 takes more concentration and less blinking. The 1600 x 900 is uncomfortably small at first glance, but that's not really fair because I need more time to get used to it, assuming I do get used to it. I bet a lot of users have so I would expect I would too. I get a little impatient at times staring into the screen rather than casually looking at it.

The 1600 x 900 can be set down a resolution to 1268 x 768 and not 1366 x 768. 1268 is less crisp in the display compared to 1366 x 768 and 1600 x 900, evident when looking at some pictures. 1600 is 32 down, reaches X in Excel, 1366 reaches 25.5 down and something to the right (I'll check in a sec.) Edit: up to U to the right.

But there is a difference between the 2, so that is going to delay any purchase I make. I prefer the 1366 in comfortability, but given more time I might adjust to the 1600 and it may even be more useful with more room it has (I can't open any programs). Oh and if you set the DPI higher on the 1600, the two are just about the same barring firefox which is till a bit small, so 1600 comes with more advantages in flexibility.

The 1600 still has the large borders on the right and left of web browsers, so it is not efficient in screen management. Obviously the people in the pictures linked by Jparity had every browser in window mode for good reason, to hide the borders. They aren't that bad though, but they are different.

Most of this might not even matter, as arth1 points out not changing the DPI to 96, I don't have time right now to read all of your reply right now.

EDIT: The only reason it is hard to get used to is when you compare it next to the 1366 resolution. After 20 minutes, I got used to the 1600 resolution easily. The only thing that throws me off is when I look back to the 1366 because the 1366 feels more "normal" and well adjusted. Unfortunately there isn't Photoshop on it (or any other intensive program worth mentioning) but I would love to use my pictures on them and see how they compare in that field.

 

Posting from my new z690.

Beautiful screen, wonderfully built, but I'm not sure how I feel about this 1600 x 900 native resolution. Everything's... tiny to me.

My contact lens prescription is about a -2.00 OS/OD, if that's any indication, and I'm wearing them right now. Not entirely sure if I'd prefer the 1366 x 768 z640 or not.

The premium carbon fiber lid IS sexy, though. Haven't seen it in daylight, but in a well-lit room at night, it's sexy.

 

Don't forget if you Firefox that you can zoom nicely. I have a new 24" widescreen monitor with a resolution that is comfortable for me ... but I also realized quickly that when Firefox was maximized a lot of sites were suddenly a bit small, and spaced a bit off.

I put the add-on "NoSquint" and I'm thrilled. You can zoom the page or the text, and this add-on will keep your settings. Highly recommend that add-on to anyone with a widescreen that feels a bit small when viewing websites.

Something to remember if viewing websites was one of the big/only drawbacks to the 1600x900 resolution.

 

Okay, so spare me some searching: what's the DPI thing I ought to be doing to try on this 1600 x 900 beautiful-yet-small display?

 

96 is the standard, and that's what they should both be set at if you want to compare them side by side

 

Read arth's reply above. What he says is you shouldn't have them at 96 DPI. Hopefully arth can give some more details on this.

So basically don't worry about DPI.

 

Hey! Have you run a 3DMark score on the 610? I'm curious to see how it scores. Thanks!

Also, is the computer quick and responsive? Does it start up quickly, etc? I'm still not convinced I like the 1340 enough to keep it but I don't want to be charged a 15% restocking fee from BB if I open the 610 and end up figuring out it's slow and not what I expected.

 

You're not buying Z just for its speed. You're buying it for its weight as well. Not many laptops (especially not Dell) has the speed to weight ratio like the Z. And on top, you're also slapping Sony brand name on it. However, I bought my Z570 when it had just came out, so paid $2350 for it. Now, you can get the same spec. (even the same machine) for probably $1800-$1900. Which is what Dell would charge you for similarly spec'ed machine.

Granted that you may be able to configure Dell and other laptops with slightly decent graphics card, but you have the weight, and sleek factor with the Z .

Also, just wanted to point out, graphics is an issue if you want to use this laptop for games. If you buy it for what it is, a business laptop, for any heavy non-graphics computing, it handles beautifully. I am an engineer, and I do lot of model simulations and such, and for it, the Z is quite decently fast.

Besides the graphics card, Z has as many useful bells/whistle as any other laptop.

 

What are your thoughts on 7200 vs 5400 RPM HDD? Worth it/pro cons? I know there are many different versions so I am speaking specifically of the ones provided by Sony.

Do you think a processor upgrade is worth it?

(Also will this affect battery much?)

 

Yeah I understand that. I currently have an HP tablet I got a year ago and the reason I'm replacing it is that it is way too slow even though it's only 3 pounds and has many of the things I want in a computer (it got slightly faster with windows 7 but still...I blame the ULV core 2 duo processor). I just don't want to have the same problem with this one because I do want the speed plus the weight (and the battery life of 5 hours on stamina!). If it's also going to be slow then there isn't much of a difference from what I have now, you know?

 

Does anyone also know if it's easy to gain access to the CPU on this model if I ever want to upgrade in the future from the P8600 to like the P9500/P9600.

 

Well, I'm kind of thinking that for constant use, this 1600 x 900 bit might be a little on the small side for me. Would imagine that something like 1366 x 768 or even 1280 x 800 would be better, but sadly, the z640 is not yet available at SonyStyle.

 

Why would Sony make the default DPI setting (96) not the ideal setting? I can read text fine at 96 DPI and BD movies look fantastic. What say you arth?

 

For the best results, the screen resolution should be set to native, and the DPI set to the DPI for that particular resolution and screen size.

To easily calculate the DPI of your display, go to:
http://www.le-web.org/dpi-calculator/

After you do this, text on your 1280x1024 19" monitor will appear the exact same size as on your 1600x900 13" LCD display. Or on a piece of paper, for that matter. A 10 point font on screen will appear the exact same size after printing out -- you can overlay one on the other. Only the crispness and legibility of the text will vary. For fonts that have built-in "hinting" for certain font sizes, the hinting closest to your real DPI will be chosen, for an even better looking result.

Again, to get more text to fit on the screen, simply adjust the font size or zoom out, don't change the DPI. If you want the icons smaller or larger, adjust the icon size, not the DPI setting.

By setting a wrong DPI, you won't have WYSIWYG, and won't be able to move from machine to machine and monitor to monitor without the real world size of fonts, icons and scalable elements changing on you.

 

Because a 1600x900 display with 96 DPI would be much bigger than 13.3"?

As the resolution of displays increase faster than the size of the displays, the DPI increases. The default is Microsoft's choice, and not the OEM's.
Microsoft's default used to be 72 dpi back when monitors had much lower resolutions, and now it's 96 dpi. In a future version of Windows, the default might be 120 dpi.

That you have misunderstood what DPI is about. If you can read smaller text, and want to see smaller text, then adjust the font size (or zoom value, for programs that provide zoom functionality). If you set the DPI to 96 dpi to get all the fonts smaller, they will, indeed, get smaller. But they will not always look as good. If instead you set the correct dpi, and change the font size, the font engine can use the hinting that's appropriate for your display's DPI, and the fonts become better shaped and more legible at the same apparent size.

One common effect of abusing the DPI setting as a lazy man's way of changing font sizes is letters becoming pencil thin -- a single pixel wide -- when your true resolution allows you to have slightly thicker lines without taking up more space. Another is when there's a single pixel's gap between the i and the dot over it, making it hard to tell whether it's an "i" or an "l". When the font engine knows that your display has a very high DPI, it can adjust the font accordingly, e.g. making a two pixel gap between the letter and the dot, or making the dot bigger. Without taking up any more space.

Never mind that you can't ever proof any document without setting the DPI correctly. If you print out a page, and hold it over the display, a correctly set display will show everything in the same size on screen as on paper. You can overlay the two. With the DPI set incorrectly, you will get a mismatch.

As for BD movies looking fantastic at 96 dpi, that again tells me that you don't understand what DPI means. The video display is totally independent of the DPI setting. Videos will be scaled to the full screen resolution no matter what the DPI is set to. Whether you have the DPI at 96, 72 or 140 won't matter one bit.

DPI means "dots per inch" and is used by the operating system and rendering engines whenever they need to present anything based on physical, real world measurements. If they want to display something that's 128x96 pixels, DPI doesn't come into play. If they want to display something full screen at 1600x900 pixels, DPI doesn't come into play. If they want to display a 8x12 pixel font, DPI doesn't come into play.
However, if they need to display a font that is 12 points, that's a physical measurement, and they need to calculate based on what the DPI is.
And if they need to display a ruler on-screen that's 10 cm long, they also need to know the correct DPI.

That all the fonts become smaller and you suddenly fit a lot more on the screen if you set the DPI to 96 is a side effect, caused by the OS then switching to different fonts that are smaller, designed for lower resolutions. But that's still a side effect, and not the solution. The solution is to start using smaller fonts when you want smaller fonts.

 

140 dpi. Then adjust the font size to what's comfortable for the application you're in.
The result should be much more legible and better looking fonts, both for smaller and larger fonts.

Don't listen to the guy who tells you to set all the displays to the same DPI -- he doesn't understand what DPI means, and ends up comparing pixel count. By setting the DPI to the same, you take the "per inch" out of the equation, and only the pixel resolution matters.