Official VAIO Z Core 2 Duo Series Owners Thread

It sounds like the firewall on the access point / router is set to only allow certain addresses. For some routers, users are assigned a "class" based on the connection type, and different classes have different rules.
In any case, this is almost certainly a router configuration issue (or you connecting through wireless to an open access point that has these restrictions, in which case it isn't an issue, but by design).

 

I've been curious about the GPS built in to my Z690... I can't seem to enable it without the WLAN turning off. I realize the GPS function is built in to the Gobi WWAN chipset, but it seems odd that they both can't be anable at the same time.

Does anyone know how to make the GPS work while keeping WLAN active?

 

I thought it too but the router is owned by my landlord and he doesn't know the credetials to access the administration page (its a NETGEAR installed by comcast). So he can't have modified it.
Moreover I can't think why the vaio should be assigned to a different class than my old laptop (both use 802.11g) the only thing in which they differ from the router's point of view is the MAC address and we don't use MAC lists.
Anyway I think that its a router issue too, its just a very strange one.
I will try to use another wireless router and I'll post again if it won't resolve the problem.

Thanks

 

Has anyone tried running kubuntu on a Z590?

The 64-bit image booted from a CD-Rom, but didn't find my wireless (802.11g) router, it did find the weaker one at my neighbor's house - but wouldn't tell me his password

When I try the 64 bit version under Sun's Virtual Box, it tells me that VT-x/AMD-V is not enabled and I will need to enable it in the BIOS - is this possible on the Z590? If so, how?

Trying the 32 bit version under Virtual Box right now... the 32 bit installer is running fine (set the VM to 512Meg of RAM)... seems to be working fine, of course it's using Sun's network driver to attach to the Vista network. By the way, there's one neat trick if you're doing this ( from here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786551 ) mount the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso CD image and run sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run ... for whatever reason, I had to view the CDROM in Dolphin (file manager) before it would show up in the terminal, running this extension allows kubuntu to resize to whatever window size you like, instead of being stuck at 800x600

So, my big question, if it installs native, does GRUB play nicely with Vista?

Can I use my (5 DVD) restore image to restore my Vaio system into a smaller partition without problems?

And, assuming you like kubuntu to begin with, does it work well on the Vaio Z?

Thanks!

 

Awesome thanks. Will go for the cheaper one. ;-)

 

Just a quick post to let people know (in case they didn't already know - it would be the first time that I was the last person to figure something out ) that only a select few of the available Extended Warranties are available online compared to what you can get by phone. As an example, online the only non-Accidental Damage warranty available for 3 years is a Depot Service, which means you call Sony, they mail you a box, you mail the laptop back, Sony services it and then mails the laptop back to you. However, by calling the SonyStyle toll-free number, I was able to buy a plan that is NOT available online (for $80 more) which was 3 years of ON-SITE Extended Warranty coverage.

The Moral of the Story: Buy the laptop online if you want to, but definately call the phone number if you aren't 100% positive that an extended warranty plan you really want is listed online.

 

Yea actully I did receive the same letter in mail a couple weeks back.

Sorry forgot to post it here.

 

I get what a Depot Service is as you explained, and which I have had to do, but what exactly does Sony Provide different under the ON SITE SERVICE PLAN.

 

Sony's contracted service provider will send a technician to your home to fix your laptop when you request for service.

 

No, it is not possible. Sony has chosen not to allow the user to enable this, despite the hardware supporting it. So if running VMware, VirtualBox or xen, you'll be limited to running 32-bit guest OSes, regardless of whether the host OS is 64-bit or not.

No, it doesn't.
Or, rather, it doesn't play nice with EFI boot. If you install grub on the master boot record, you blow away the start of the much larger MBR that the newest Microsoft OSes rely on.

While grub makes an entry that will boot Vista, you will lose access to booting the recovery partition by holding down F10, and other tools that use the EFI.
In addition, Vista Backup (in Vista Business and Ultimate) will refuse to run because the MBR doesn't match the expected, and it can't evaluate which partition to use. Oh, and Sony Vaio Recovery Center can no longer create recovery DVDs.

So no, grub doesn't play nice.

That said, you can use the Windows Boot Manager to boot grub, which in turn boots your OS. What you do is:

Install linux (or whatever else uses grub), but choose to not overwrite the MBR by writing to /dev/sda, but instead save grub to the boot block of the partition that the new OS is on. Most likely, this will be /dev/sda3, sda4 or sda5, depending on your partitioning.
After installing the OS, you need to make a copy of this boot block. The easiest way is to boot a liveCD, and then make a copy:

<PRE>cd /tmp
dd if=/dev/sda3 of=grub.boot bs=512 count=1</PRE>
If you are unsure whether you got the right partition, do a "strings grub.boot", and check whether the output contains "GRUB" somewhere.

Now e-mail this file to yourself, or, if your liveCD allows it, save it to your C: drive, or an USB stick, or a memory card.

Now boot into Windows.
Copy the grub.boot (or whatever you named it) file to C:\
Open a command prompt with administrator rights. To do this, go to Start->Programs->Accessories. Right-click "Command Prompt" and choose "Run as Administrator".

Now enter:

<PRE>bcdedit /create /d "My Other OS" /application bootsector</PRE>
This will return a long string looking something like {12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789abc}
Copy this string (including the brackets) to your clipboard, because you'll need it. I'll call this string {...} from now on:
Ok, continue with:

<PRE>bcdedit /set {...} device boot
bcdedit /set {...} path "\grub.boot"
bcdedit /displayorder {...} /addlast
bcdedit /timeout 6</PRE>
Now enter "bcdedit" without any parameters, and verify that the end of the output looks something like:

<PRE>Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier {...}
device boot
path \grub.boot
description My Other OS</PRE>
If this went all well, you can now boot and choose your OS at startup. After booting into your other OS, edit the grub menu.lst file and set the timeout to 0, so you won't have to choose (or wait) twice.

As far as I know, no. It will blow away anything that's on the disk and create one big partition.

I refuse to use systems that have wildcard entries in /etc/sudoers -- it's an abomination unto Nuggan.

Fedora 10 and OpenSuSE 11 work reasonably well, although getting the nVidia card to work is tricky, and must be done manually (cause all automated tools or packages will screw it up due to the dual cards).

 

Just got my Z590 returned to me today, the screen was swapped to the correct resolution version. It still burns me up a little that it came from the factory like that, but at least I ca use it now.

I have two questions after playing around a little:

1. I read somewhere there was a RAID option on the Z. Is this right, and if so, does this basically mean it can take a second hard drive? I was interested in getting a smaller SSD as my main boot drive and using the 320GB it came with as the supporting file drive.

2. Is there anyway to unlock the BIOS on these things? There's hardly any options in here.

 

I just had to Activate my Vista Ultimate install for the second time since I "recovered" my system using the Recovery DVDs. Has this happened to anyone else?

On day I had to recover the system because it wouldn't boot normally. After the recovery (i.e. during the install and just after), I wasn't immediately asked to activate the OS. Then, 2 weeks ago, I got the Activatation Demand (or boot to a limited OS) at logon. I had internet available at the time, so I activated over the internet. Now, a week later, I was just prompted again with the Activation Demand window upon logon - only this time I didn't have internet available, so I had to do it by phone. It's very weird and annoying that the first activation didn't "take." Hopefully, the phone-based activation will have better results?

In any event, let me know if you've had a similar problem with Vista "forgetting" that it was activated or know of a way to stop the madness.

 

Thanks for all the detail - I had read something (obviously incorrect) somewhere about virtual machines being disabled altogether on the Zs, glad that at least that was false, I had assumed it was.

I believe in security through denial of physical (and remote) access, so I'm not as concerned about easy root exploits - and I do development in Qt, so kubuntu is the path of least resistance to working with their tools (yes, you can develop Qt in/on _almost_ anything, no I don't prefer to spend my time tweaking tools instead of developing product.) And on the subject of wasting time, I feel a rant coming on...

Word to Sony if you are reading all this: making your users burn their own recovery disks is a rude disrespect of the value of our time. Even though I have a purchased a premium product, I am not well off enough to just "have someone deal with it for me," and the time I spent burning the 5 DVDs recommended in your QuickStart guide (Windows complete backup) PLUS the 2 more recovery DVDs I learned about after digging through the programs menu is worth a great deal to me. I know keeping the DVDs all straight and up to date is a management headache for you as a company, but it pales in comparison to the labor you are requiring of ALL of your customers to deal with it for you. I never expected that a nearly $3000 notebook computer wouldn't come with $2 worth of discs that save me hours of time and trouble making them myself (not to mention the possibility that the discs I have made might be flawed and I cannot simply get replacements from Sony, can I?) System software on DVD/BluRay is a feature I will look for in the future.

 

I'd rather burn it myself for practically free (minus opportunity cost in time and discs) than spend another $100 on a prepackaged set of recovery discs. Do you realize that they charge +$150 for an XP downgrade disc in the CTO? (Yes we want it to be free, but it won't be.)

 

@SPEEDwithJJ: Is the keyboard cover really worth $10?

 

It is free for those who order Vista Business. I didn't pay a dime for my XP downgrade DVD.
The costs for XP when delivered with other OS versions is due to Microsoft charging extra for the license -- only Vista Business comes with a downgradable license.

And due to MS wanting to sell Vista instead of XP, the cost of OEM XP licenses has increased substantially the last year. Granted, $100 wouid have been more realistic than $150, but whenever something is sold, big corporations bring out the multiplication table and add their own profit. That's just BAU.

 

That's not the main problem with wildcard sudoers. The main problem is that when using sudo, root inherits the environment of the user who calls it.
As an example, an sudo'ed program will see ~user as its home directory instead of ~root. And will then proceed to overwrite files in the user's directory, which the user later can't change. Hard to diagnose errors then tend to occur.

As a Unix sysadmin, the first thing I ever do when troubleshooting a user's Ubuntu system is:

<PRE>find ~user -user 0 -o -group 0</PRE>
If this returns any files at all, it's too many.

Like Windows 95, Ubuntu quickly became popular with the masses due to its ease of use. And IMO, like Win9x, Ubuntu's ease of use comes at the cost of it not working reliably, being broken by design.

A good Linux is user-friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are.

 

It is also included when you order the Z with Vista Ultimate.

 

Right. But I didn't mean for the XP disc to be free, I meant I want the recovery disc to be free, which is of course the whole point of the post. For a company like Sony to include a set of recovery discs with each unit, you are going to expect $$$. I'll be the first to say that Sony over charges on most of its items. So I am fine with burning them myself if that means no increase in price, that's all I meant.

PS. Business that they have is 32-bit, and it's $50 more with the XP-disc, so that's a downgrade.

 

Yes it is included for 150$ more.

 

Anyone gotten the GPS to work in parallel with WLAN?

 

I apologize for correcting you, but - for me, at least - the only extra cost was for getting Vista Ultimate. There was no additional (itemized) cost for the XP downgrade; any associated price was hidden in a bundle price for Vista Ultimate. Even in the Retail/Wholesale supply chain, Vista Ultimate is more quite a bit more expensive than any other version of Vista.

 

It's not retail. And you're paying +$150 over what you're already paying for Vista x64 (+$0 or however much they've included in the cost). It's not worth +$150 more since it's not much different, that's all I can really say about that.

 

Just curious if anyone can help me on these?

 

I have a new Z590 with Vista Ultimate... it didn't come with any discs at all.

I don't mind the $3.50 cost of the media, what I do mind is spending hours to burn it, with no practical way of being sure that it's really a useful backup when complete.

 

All too true... I have used Linux off and on since Slackware '96.... pretty consistently since doing a Gentoo-64 build in 2004ish (when XP-64 didn't work yet.) It has steadily improved and if it weren't for driver hell, I'd put it ahead of Vista in terms of usability today. Slack96 was such a crusty pile that I never actually did more than set it up, use it for a month and abandon it due to the horrible time-suck that it was. Today we can port our apps in from Windows to an embedded Linux system with just a recompile and actually get reliable operation, without a bunch of license fee headache to boot - I wouldn't mind the license fees if we weren't paying them to the enigma that is the source of all our troubles...

Don't know if there will ever be a balance between an easy to use user managed system and security, in our embedded systems it's great to have the lock-down security since we don't want the users changing anything.

 

I will be glad to help, please ask away. I have a RAID-enabled Z. It has two 1.8" microSATA II SSDs in place of one 2.5" SATA II HDD. They are attached using a different connector (obviously) and bracket.

With regard to the second question, the BIOS in my Z has an additional tab called "Advanced" and you can have the RAID settings shown or hidden on boot-up. Once the RAID shows after post screen, pressing CTRL-I brings up the choices for RAID: you can set it up to be RAID0, RAID1 or non-RAID (i.e. two SSDs work as two independent drives). Needless to say, these changes require re-installation of the OS. In other words, the decision about RAID must be taken before the installation of the OS. SONY's default is RAID0.

 

Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm not interested so much in having RAID set up on my Z as I am in installing 2 hard drives in it. Is this easily possible if what I have right now is the 320GB drive that came with it?

As for the BIOS question, I'm really looking to be able to tweak certain settings and this BIOS seems very locked down. I didn't know if there was a keystroke to use to get into hidden settings or anything like that.

 

Not easy to put two drives in. Sony's RAID config as was said above is a very special configuration.

If you look at the numerous threads around here, it becomes very evident that Sony locks down their BIOS, so what you see is what you get. For example, if you want to use VT-x for programs like VMWare Workstation, forget it.

 

I am seriously thinking of replacing my Macbook Air, which someone wants to buy from me, for a Z. Probably the entry-level model (i.e. with the lower screen res).

Amongst a number of great irritations, one thing I love about the MBA is the power adapter -- not much bigger than a plug. Can anyone comment on how big a footprint the Z adapter is and how heavy it is?

Also, with VLC media player on the MBA you could drive the speakers up very loud, handy for movies. How loud do the speakers on the Z go and are they any good?

Thanks.

 

Ok. last question before I make the plunge.

Anyone think I'll REALLY see a difference in everyday applications between a z690 with p8700 or a p9600? I"ve looked at the benchmarks, but overall, it's hard to say without real-life using each one. Mind you, no gaming, only photoshop, access work, and wave file/mp3 editing (not production, just splicing etc.)

OH yeah, I'm currently on a SZ650N/c with a T7500 & 4GB RAM. I already bought a intel x25 for it (got it cheap, <$300).

 

Hello,
Z520 touchpad won't work when the laptop comes back from hibernation, any idea since I have to restart each time.

Thanks

 

While my Z was being repaired (it's the P8600 2.53GHz), I temporarily had a Z610 which was I believe 2.4GHz. Honestly, there was not much of a difference. I could tell the disk drive difference because my Z has the RAIDed drives, but overall in terms of processing power, the only program you mention which may sap it a bit is Photoshop.

 

Does NOBODY have any ideas on how to resolve this? I just hppenened 3 times in a row on the same day!!! It did boot the last two times today without a message appearing. This time it was complaining about the product key being invalid and asking me if I wanted to re-enter it. As soon as I re-enter it, it's happy for that boot.

I have to tell you, I'm missing the days when paying for the product was all I had to do to be entitled to us it.

 

Yessir, the phone activation is the real activation and is required for Vista. What you entered when installing the OS was just a preliminary. If you read the fresh-install guide thread, you can insert into a USB flash drive an .exe that completely ignores the phone activation, to which the author states as I'm paraphrasing "that way, Big Brother won't be watching you." It may come in handy if you prefer not to call in when installing Vista.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=293880&highlight=sony+vaio+fresh+install

 

Frys now has the the Z620 $1949.99 and Z670 $2199.99.

 

That's really strange? I've never activated my Vista, as they were pre-activated...even after "recovering"...

 

but in amazon z620 $1699.99 and z670 $1899.99

 

The activation is stored in the registry. That it doesn't "take" and survive reboot indicates that the registry isn't written to disk like it's supposed to, either because of permission issues, or because the location is wrong.
This can occur after an OS reinstall combined with a restore from backup (or copy from the old drive), or if the partition layout has changed between the backup and the restore.

To check this, run regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\hivelist

First check that the \Device\HarddiskVolumeN entry matches the partition your Windows installation is on. If N is 2, then it should be the second partition.

Then, check that the S-1-5-* value listed at the bottom, \Registry\User\S-1-5-* match the entries under HKEY_USERS. The S-1-5-* number has to match exactly.

If either of these are wrong, you're royally fubared, and the easiest thing to do is to start over from scratch.

If those were OK, make sure the permissions are correct. The easiest way is to re-run the permission setup. To do that, you need to open a command prompt with administrator privileges (right-click "Command Prompt" under Accessories, and chooose "Run as Administrator). Then follow these instructions.

You can also go through all the entries in the hivelist, and make sure that SYSTEM has "Full Control" access to all the entries listed there, as well as any files with the same name but .LOG at the end, as well as the folders the files reside in.

 

All of these have the same leading value of "DeviceHarddiskVolume3" EXCEPT for an entry "Registry\machine\BCD00000000" which has a value of "\Device\HarddiskVolume2\Boot\BCD". I have no idea what that means. I do know that in Computer Management I see an unlabeled volume listed first, then C: (where Vista is installed) then "Games" (a partition I created using Vista's Disk Management by shrinking C), then "System". That' how they are listed in the detail section in the upper right pane of Computer Management. In the lower right (graphical) pane, they are listed in a different (physical?) order: Unlabled, System, C: (vista install), then Games. If I had to guess, it's the graphical presentation that represents how the partitions are physically order, but I could use your help interpreting this. What should I do with these entries, if anything?

They are, except that the user class (second) entry has an extra "_Classes" at the end of it. The actual number string, however, is identical between them. The path values also both reference the same volume number (but different paths, of course).

Based on that information, what do you think are my next steps. I have only ever had one user account on the laptop (mine) which has always been an administrative account.

Thank you SO much for being willing to help out. By the way, so far today, Vista hasn't yet forgotten that it is activated. It is just SO weird that it doesn't seem to follow anything like a predictable pattern when it decide to flip out.

Thanks again for your continued assistance; you are very kind and generous to help!

 

Any idea?
,,,,,,

 

SonyStyle is not selling Vaio Z 690 anymore?

There is a little red alert says "This product is no longer available for purchase" when i try to buy.

What does it mean?

 

I posted that info: Frys, if people are still undecided on the high res. and cpu for example, they can just pop in and check both models out. No doubt prices are definitely cheaper elsewhere.

Does anyone know if the Z620 or Z670 have the premium carbon lid? It didn't say on the site.

 

Those have Black Carbon Fiber lid.

 

The CTO? It is working for me, it just says "backorder" because ship date is 4/21, but it's still allowing me to put in my cart to check out.

 

Does anyone know how much does it cost to replace the 13'' led lcd?

Thanks.

 

I am one of the undecided with respect to which model to get.

I would like the computer to last 4-5 years and I will be watching movies and TV through it, plus the ocasional old game.

For such person what would be the reason to get the newer models like the

Z690 with P9600 2.6Ghz/6Mb, 4 GB DDR3, 320GB 7200rpm, NVIDIA 9300M GS (256 Mb), 1600x900 screen

instead of

P8600 2.4 GHz/3Mb, 4GB DDR3, 250 5400rpm, NVIDIA 9300 (128Mb), 1366x768

the price difference is $500 (I like my computer responsive, fast at getting simple things done, like text editing, web video watching, tweaking pictures).

One more thing, is there any model of the VaioZ that one should avoid getting?

 

sorry for not searching the 700+ pages, but, i've got one of the frist vgn-z590s and i see that the z690s have x64 drivers on sony's website. will these drivers work for the 590s? thanks

 

The drivers would depend on your OS. Is yours a 64-bit or 34-bit?

 

Does anyone have images of vaio Z motherboard in high resolution (2mpx or more)?