Official Vaio Y 13.3 Series Owners Lounge

Thanks guys...I just ordered one with the i5-430um and Ati graphics card. Hopefully it'll get here before the 10/22 ship date.

 

It is just a border frame what the Y has. Only the S has a real magnesium body.

 

Not true. Like I said, it's easily visible if you remove the bottom cover.

 

Yes. That's just a border frame and not a complete base! What you see is just a part of the small body frame! Trust me - there's a difference. There is a reason why the Y isn't advertised as a Magnesium-Body notebook, but the S is and why it doesn't belong to the business series!

 

Couldn't be sure without dismantling the laptop completely but it's underside certainly apprears to made of metal. If this is not the case, large parts of it are, HDD cover for example.

 

Not talking about covers - they are metal. Talking about the base inside which you only completely see if the machine is taken apart. I've seen both the Y and the S apart, that's why I'm certain. Y is mainly plastic + some light metal covers.

They would have certainly advertised it as magnesium body if it was a real one That's why it's also cheaper

 

A larger version is here.

That's the bottom of the Y. The entire bottom is one single piece of cast magnesium. Pretty much everything you see in that picture is one piece, with the following exceptions: the barrel & hinge covers, the plastic trim piece along the back edge of the battery compartment, memory modules which poke up from the MB through the frame, and the piece of stamped sheet metal under the hard drive tray which is the keyboard support. Note that the bottom must have been powder coated black with the access panel installed, so the powder coating doesn't cover the interior part that makes up the frame, although you can see it feathering in around the edges.

You can also see from this picture that the bottom shell is not a cosmetic panel over an interior frame, it is the frame. It's all cast as one piece.
There is no further disassembly possible from the bottom. If you remove the HD, memory, and all the screws from the bottom, then you can pull the keyboard, and then the speaker cover & palm rest assembly off from above. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture handy with the keyboard removed, but if you remove it you can see that the magnesium frame extends from bottom to top and surrounds the hard drive and MB.

 

they do

Check their website, magnesium-alloy is one of the key features they mention about the Sony VAIO Y-series:

It is also mentioned on the product description sticker they had on the palm rests of my Sony VAIO Y when I got the notebook.

 

anybody here has installed linox on it?

 

That's in fact true I apologize, I was thinking of another model

Never heard of linOx.

 

Hey all.

Looking at Y with the i5 and ATi 4550, and I have a few questions.
Can anyone tell me howe this handles WoW and SCII?
How is the battery life?
How is it on keyboard flex?
Is the keyboard backlit or is that an option?

 

Can someone else who owns the Y confirm how often the fan turns on and off? On mine in the "balanced" power state using only Google Chrome, the fan runs for 60 seconds and then turns off for 60 seconds.

After reading all the reviews and earlier posts on this board about how this laptop was "whisper quiet", I can't believe I'm the only one who finds this intermittent fan incredibly annoying.

Do I have a defective model? Or is the ULV i3 processor hotter and noisier than the Y version reviewed earlier this year? The cynic in me wonders if Sony changed the fan model to a cheaper version after the review models were done....

 

That config should run WoW well at native res and max settings. I don't know what SCII is.

I'm not sure we've had anybody report on battery life for the i5+ATI combo.
A couple users here have the i3+ATI and are getting around 5 hours or so. The i5 might get a little less due to turbo boost kicking in, but perhaps that could be avoided by limiting the maximum processor state in the power saver profile.

There is no keyboard flex, and unfortunately no backlight option either.

If I'm just doing some light web browsing, Facebook, email, or MS Office, the fan stays off most of the time. When watching HD video or viewing Flash heavy web sites it runs ~50% of the time, cycling on/off every minute or two. When it runs, it runs at low speed and is fairly quiet though not silent. I can confirm that the i3 model runs slightly warmer than the older SU7300 model, so the fan cycles on a little more often, but it's not any louder.

Do you have a SonyStyle store in your area, so you can compare yours to a display model?

 

Ordered the preconfigured one with an education discount. Says it's on backorder, yet the sites says it will ship on the 23. Two days ago?

How long will it take to get them in stock?

 

Intriguingly, the Japan site still has only the Y21 listed. Replacing 21 with 22 leads to a page not found error. They hide it quite well -- you have to click on a button to show the entire lineup; of the 13" laptops, the main page only features the S and Z models. I guess they want to steer customers towards the more expensive models!

Here's the Y22 on Sony UK. I'm suspicious about the displayed image -- it shows a silver model black keyboard, like the one on the Z (Sony JP shows the silver model with the gray keyboard). And the image shows a US keyboard! Same with Sony DE -- the silver Y22 has a black US keyboard; the German Enter key looks different (tall and narrow, rather than wide and short). Anyone knows what's going on there?

 

formated my y series and installed windows 7 ultimate got all the function keys running and everything is running smooth!!

However when I formated with a clean windows 7 the recovery partition was deleted ( It shouldint have since I only formated the c drive not the recovery partition when installing windows) does anyone know if the recovery discs would recover the recovery parition?

 

Regarding SCII with the i5 and the ati 4550 I am running it at medium but during large battles it will fps will drop around 24-26 on the 1366x768 resolution and battery life is around 5 hours, but right now its saying i have 6 hours and 50 minutes at 99% on balanced with brightness half way. The keyboard does have some flex, and I believe that there is no backlit keyboard nor is there an option for it.

 

I don't know what's going on, but there doesn't appear to be any real difference between the Y21 and Y22. It looks like the Y22 is just a new number given to the CTO model in Europe. Here in the US, the CTO model disappeared for a while and when it came back, the color options had changed and the U5400 processor was added as a new option. But it's still called Y21. I'm guessing some marketing person in Europe wanted a new number while Sony US did not.

By the way, I think the black keyboard on silver body has been the standard color scheme for the Y in most of the world, but strangely it has never been offered in the US, Canada, or Japan. With the Y11, we got black on black only while everyone else got black on silver only. With the Y21, there are more options but they still vary by market.

The recovery process will wipe your clean install as well. It needs to put the recovery partition at the front of the disk where your System Reserved (boot) and C: partitions currently live.

If you have an external hard drive or a bunch of blank DVDs, you can use Acronis True Image ($50) to save an image of your current C: partition, then use the recovery discs to restore the complete system to its factory config, and finally recover your saved C: image to the new C: partition.

In theory, you should be able to do the same thing with Windows Backup & Restore instead of Acronis. However, you'll have to shrink your current C: partition first so that it will be smaller than the C: partition created by the VAIO recovery process, otherwise the stupid Windows Restore feature will fail. Also, if you're going to save the image to DVD media instead of an external HD, Windows backup requires DVD-RW. And it's possible that Windows Restore may have an issue with the Windows version mismatch as well - I'd Google around about that before trying.

 

dmk2

Thank's for the reply
I think I'll follow the first suggestion and do a clean install with the recovery disks. By the way when I installed a clean copy of windows 7 I clicked the C drive then advanced options then format. For some reason this deleted the recovery partition which it shouldn't have had. So for others I'd suggest you be careful before formating.

weber24601
what's your vaio's specs mine has the i5 and ati gpu and the fan on my notebook seems to turn on and off quite frequently

 

I used Vaio Care and an external DVD/CD burner to burn copies of the recovery partition. Then I just booted off of the OS CD, deleted the old C: partition, created two new partitions in its place, and then installed the OS on the new C: partition. I never had to touch the original recovery partition and it still resides on the hard disk.

 

Hi there, I want to order the Y series if this year's black friday goes to hell again.

Can anyone tell me how some of you are getting more color options? For example, Holzmann has a Pear Green, all I see are Black/silver/sangria red?

 

nm so apparently the UK site has the extra colors.

Do you think it's possible I can call Sony US to place an order with the extra colors?

 

The color options changed recently. Before the change, the two preconfigured choices in the US were all black, or black body with purple lid. The pear green, teal blue, pink, and silver options were CTO only. The model with the purple lid was available in SonyStyle stores, so you can probably still get one of those. And silver is still available on the current CTO model. But the green, blue, and pink options are gone. It can't hurt to call Sony and see if there are any available, but since they were CTO only I think your chances are not so good.

 

Dont get me wrong, I like all of the current color options. The "vampire cape" (sangria red) looks good, but I just thought that deep purple and the black go really well together.

 

Then you may be in luck because the purple/black combo was one of the preconfigured models and was available in stores. If you have a SonyStyle store in your area, call them. They may have one in stock or may be able to order from another store's stock.

Unless you want one of the options only available on the CTO model (i5, ATI, etc.) Then you might be stuck ordering a red one.

 

Vampire Cape it is!

 

Thanks dmk2, that clarifies matters. It does not help that some official Sony sites actually put up wrong screenshots (showing black-on-silver US-layout Y-models on European sites!) that gave the wrong impression.

I guess it'll be the black model for me then. I'll wait to pick one up until I visit the States -- cheaper price, more accessories (the keyboard skin won't fit European models -- damn that odd-shaped Enter key they have here!) and as I use it mostly to program and script, I'm using the US layout on the German keyboard anyway. The German layout is a Unix nightmare! (try finding the @, <, >, |, and / keys on it and be scared)

 

I'd suspect that the Windows 7 installer misidentify the drives and just simply label the Windows-readable partitions as C, D, etc. starting from the first one it finds without checking the partition type.

You'd want to format the large partition that occupies most of the disk

 

That is exactly what I did I formatted the C: drive which is the large partition that occupies most of the disk, but for some reason this also cleared and deleted the recovery partition

 

Question about the black color....

is it a matte black? satin? shiny? Does it collect fingerprints like crazy?

Thanks.

 

It's a very nice matte black, BTW the the whole chassis is made of magnesium alloy . Picks up fingerprint only if you have super oily hands. But otherwise its very good with fingerprints

 

Hey guys,

So in a few weeks I'll have to give back my work machine and the only laptop I'll have left will be some 2-year old $500 Acer which is definitely not what you would bring to work meetings. I was looking for something small, light, business-looking and with a good battery life (I take a 7-hour flight about once a month so I wanted it to last at least 4 hours, preferably 5).

I was mainly hesitating between 3 machines: Asus EeePC 1215N, Sony Vaio VPCY216FX and Toshiba Protege R705.
The Toshiba Protege R705 is definitely the most powerful laptop out of those three and it's not much more expensive but I went to play with it at BestBuy earlier today and I just couldn't use the keyboard: I felt like I was missing the keys even when I wasn't. Definitely a deal-breaker.
The EeePC 1215N seems like a great machine with a better battery life and higher graphics performance but I liked the look of the Sony a lot better (I fell in love the first time I saw the new Vaios a few months back), and I had a $250 gift card on TigerDirect.com but the 1215N wasn't available over there. Also I felt like a 13" isn't too big to carry around and would be better for watching movies.

So I went with the Sony. The most CPU/GPU-intensive thing I'll do on this computer will be playing 720p videos with a 1.5 Mb/s bitrate (which is obviously a lot more than what you can find on Youtube for example) and I wasn't sure an i3-330UM with integrated graphics could handle that, but after a few hours of reading and researching it seems like it should be possible.

I placed my order on TigerDirect.com a few hours ago: $650 incl. taxes - $250 gift card - $50 Bank of America "add it up" cashback = $350.

I should receive it in a few days and the first thing I'll try will be some serious video playback. If it can't handle the video files I already have then I'll send it back, otherwise I'll keep it and go forth with a clean install. Either way I'll report back here as I'm sure that could be helpful for a lot of people

Cheers.

 

I am sitting here on a flight between IAD and SFO. I have been using my Y since shortly after takeoff or about 3 hours ago.

I have noticed that in this time my battery meter has not budged and when I hover my mouse over it, it says 100% with 4 hours, 50 minutes of juice.

I have never had battery meter problems with this thing before. I have shut it down, taken out the batter, inspected it, and rebooted, and I am still getting the same thing. The battery looks fine. Nothing remotely damaging has happened since I last used the laptop and the battery meter was working perfectly.

What gives?

 

I'd like to buy a new lap. I just can pay around 800~900$ for it. Should I buy sony vaio Y with Core i3 / HD 4550 / 4GB DDR3 / 500GB? I'll use it for my job and just play a game PES11. I wonder if Vaio Y can play this game. And with this money whether my choice is right or not. Thx

 

Strange. I'd start by installing BatteryBar for more info. If it looks like it's just a Windows reporting issue, you could also try a "calibration" cycle.

I have no idea about PES 11 performance, but according to Notebookcheck, FIFA 11 should run smoothly at medium settings. Not sure if that helps.

The ATI HD 4550 (545v) is a DirectX 10.1 chip that can run most recent games comfortably with low or medium settings and most 2-3 year old games at medium or high settings. There are exceptions of course. Crysis is 3 years old but it still needs low settings.

There are other machines in the Y's price range that offer better gaming performance. The main selling point of the Y IMHO is better build quality and a better keyboard.

 

Agreed. Like I said, the Toshiba R705 looks a lot more interesting on paper: better processor yet not much difference on the price nor the battery life, also it has a DVD drive and a very good build quality. But when I tried one at BestBuy I couldn't believe how terrible the keyboard was: when typing I was missing probably 5% of the keys and overall it felt very uncomfortable. Everytime I pressed a key I wasn't sure whether I actually did or not. I was convinced it would never do it for me (even after weeks of using it) whereas the Sony keyboard just felt perfect. And I'm usually not the kind of person who would choose a computer over another because of its look and feel as I value the price/performance ratio a lot more. Well now is the time to change that!

Nobody was home yesterday so the UPS guy will be back with my Vaio Y on Monday... can't wait!

 

Yeah, I tried the R705 at Best Buy too. The R705 keyboard is vertically squashed. They key pitch is standard in the horizontal dimension but less than standard in the vertical dimension. If it were the only computer I used, I could probably get used to it. But switching back and forth between it and my work laptop would be a pain. The R705 also runs a bit hot for use on my lap.

Hope you guys like your new Ys.

 

I ended up just plugging in the laptop and doing this somehow "woke up" the battery and it started reporting correctly.

Kudos to Virgin America for having plugs for every seat.

 

So I received my Vaio Y a few hours ago.

The overall build quality is good : it feels sturdy and looks very professional. The keyboard is really awesome and I got used to it in no time. A few things caught my eyes though:
- the battery wiggles. Just to be clear: I read a lot of threads on many forums about this so it's the first thing I looked at after unpacking the laptop, otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed it right away (though it makes some noise every time you grab the laptop off the table). Not a big deal, especially since you can add some tape to make it stop if it becomes too annoying.
- the screen flexes quite a lot, especially around the webcam area. It's so thin it has to be expected, yet it kinda worries me since that's where I push to open the laptop.
- when the laptop is plugged in, the power jack moves like if it wasn't fully inserted. Again, not a big deal but worth noting.

Like I said, the most graphic-intensive task I'll have will be playing some good quality 720p videos (1.5 mbps bitrate). I turned on the laptop, went through the setup procedure and installed the codecs, copied the video file... and it plays perfectly fine with the CPU staying between 25 and 50%. In other words, I'm totally keeping it!

Next step: get a SSD and do a clean installation

And thanks holzmann, you talking about in-flight power plugs made me do some research on the transatlantic flights I'll be taking next month, and it appears the Air France A380 also have a plug for every seat. Awesome!

 

Hi everyone,

I was wondering why some of you intend to replace the HDD with a SSD instead of simply ordering the vaio with a SSD. Is it overpriced or simply bad quality? Any experiences?

 

1. I bought my Vaio on TigerDirect.com instead of Sony Style for several reasons (lower price + no tax + 8% cashback with my BoA debit card + gift certificate from my boss). They only had one model (i3, integrated graphics and no SSD) so I didn't have a choice.
2. When ordering a computer with a SSD, you can't choose which model you will get. Performance of a Kingston SSDNow V Series is miles away from that of a Crucial RealSSD C300 for example.
3. I haven't checked for Sony but upgrades on CTO configurations are usually way more expensive than if you bought them yourself. Of course you can't upgrade the processor or the GPU on your own, but the hard drive and the RAM are different stories.

 

Hey guys, I decided to buy Vaio Y ^.^, but I'm still concerned about its color. I hate the power button with Green, and wonder if it should be changed or not. >"<
And according to ur ideal, silver or black is better.
Any ur suggestion is appreciated. thx much

 

In my case, there was no SSD option available when I got my Y. Also, I didn't need 256 GB of space on this computer.

If you can live with a 100-128 GB SSD, then you can save a lot of money buying your own. But if you want a 256 GB SSD, $550 is not terribly overpriced. For the same price, you might be able to get a faster SSD with the same capacity. Or for $50 less, you can get a similar SSD. But the price is in the right ballpark.

Personally, I like the SSD + fresh start options combined. Then you don't have to do anything when you get it - just use the laptop. Without the fresh start option, I'd rather buy my own SSD since I'm going to do a clean install anyway.

Do you mean the glowing & flashing power LED? I don't like that either. I prefer a more subtle indicator. But it's no big deal. As for color, get what you like. I like the silver color with black keyboard best, but it's not available here.

 

SSD has many advantages: its memory is made by flash not hard disk, it means that your Hard disk will not turn around, not move anymore. It makes it stronger, more stable. In addition, SSD is much faster than HDD because it just go to memory track to take it not find out from hundreds of slice disk. But SSD has the only disadvantage: its price. So if money is not ur problem, you want to use new technology, SSD is for you.

So can the power LED be turned off?

 

I don't need that much space either. But forunately the only option for a SSD Sony offers here in Germany is a 128gb for 230€ (about 320 $). Most SSD's offered here are that expensive, my only fear is that the ones Sony offers are much slower. But if there isn't a big difference between the performances I think I'll pay a little more and save time an frustration.

 

Your best bet would be to check which SSDs Sony uses (i.e. ask someone who ordered their Vaio - preferably Y - with an SSD) and look at the performance tests featuring this model. There IS a huge gap in performance between different SSD models.

 

Hi, I have a y21 with i5, 4gb RAM, ATI 540v and the 128 gb SSD we have in Sony Europe.
The SSD is a TOSHIBA THNS128GG4BBAA.

The feeling with this drive is that everything you do on win7 is really smooth and quick.

References:

PassMark Software - Hard Drive Benchmark Charts

The 2010 Macbook Pro's use Toshiba's HG2 SSD Drives - MacRumors Forums

Toshiba HG2 43nm 256GB Solid State Drive Review - Toshiba's 43nm HG2 SSD - Legit Reviews

 

One other important thing which you leave out about SSD: No more defrag and you know how pain in the a* that is!

 

I am thinking of getting a Y and use my Sony $200 gc. Any good deals out there? It must be from a Sony authorized dealer.

 

Has anyone else seen this?

Sony shrinks Vaio Y series to 11.6 inches, threatens to cut you if you call it a netbook -- Engadget