Sony CW i3/i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

from 73% to 67% after 8hrs not used shut down guess its ok of a drain??

 

dose not sound too unreasonable too me

 

can anyone link me where to download nvidia advance control panel? tried some googling but seemed that my googling skill sucks.

and how do i stretch my applications from 4:3 to 16:9? its in nvidia right?

 

Do you have a 16:9 and you are talking movies right?

 

i have the invidia system tools do i need some other program to oc my gpu? or is this enough?

 

Hey guys, I'm thinking about buying one, CW290. I have been reading a few pages from this thread and I saw many people posting problems about battery, harddrive failing, graphics card failing. Why are there so many problems and are they really bad?

 

Battery = battery meter glitch but it doesn't affect battery performance.

HDD = there are only 2 or 3 reportedly having those issues

*My CW is performing flawlessly except for the battery meter glitch.

 

Cool, can I expect it to last 4 years?

 

Ditto on my CW as well.

 

Hey Guys,

I have a problem with my Vaio CW i5. Ever since I got it I could not use sleep mode. It would go to sleep and when I tried to wake it up the screen would stay black and the fan would com on at high speed.

A few days ago I updated the bios. The sleep function seemed to work for a couple days and today it would not wake. Now sleep still usually works but the fan is running at full speed all the time... when I am in windows.

Any ideas on what could be causing this? It happend after waking up the laptop this morning and I have rebooted 3 times and the fan runs constantly if windows is running. Fan does not run while computer is booting up.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thinking a clean install is in order anyway.

 

I want to do a clean install on mine as well, but the fan running is I've noticed in part due to the updated bios, to combat the overheating issues that they hotfixed. The fan could also be in part due to the energy settings you have set up in the Vaio setting manager (not at home so I can't tell the exact name of the program). There are parts in there that say give priority to heat discharge, which of course, makes you use your fan at the highest setting. The part about sleep, I'm not sure, but you could have too many programs open and it is locking up (not sure about that one). Also, the power save settings in the same menu I mentioned before let you control sleep/hibernate options. Are you waking the sleeping computer by pressing the power button? If so, then by default you are putting it back into sleep mode by pressing this button....try just hitting space bar or some other key.

 

Has anyone tried to put in a 1TB hard drive into their CW series? The only 2.5 1TB drive that I find online is a Western Digital, but it appears that it's too large to fit many laptops, so I'm not sure if it will fit.

Also, there are a few 1TB externals (Seagate & Toshiba), and I'm wondering if anyone has tried to remove the drive and put it into their CW.

 

I don't use sleep/hibernate since it often cause OS instability after resuming to Windows plus it doesn't take my CW to boot up with long since I got a SSD.

Use HWMonitor to check your temps (might be the reason of your high fan speed)

 

Love my CW as well.

 

So I know earlier in this thread people have replaced their disc drive with a new hard drive. Is there a way to convert the blu-ray player that you take out to a portable drive? Some sort of enclosure? It would be nice to have the blu-ray player working, but not attached to my laptop 24/7, since I really only use it on rare occasions.

edit: Also, does anyone have any success (or horror) stories about the seagate momentus xt hybrid drive? I'm still very interested in putting one in mine, but hesitant because it is a brand new technology (hybrid)

 

I've had the Momentus XT for about a month now. No vibrations, noise or heat for me, although others have reported such. It boots super quick and has had no apparent impact on battery life.

 

got problem... battery 15% charging 4 almost 1hrs 30min..
im using a sony vaio cw26 i5... i usually use my lappy using AV adaptor w/o the battery plug in... one day i try to charge it almost 2hrs then worst case scenario begin when i saw my battery icon.. it only had 15%.. is it serious?

 

can someone point me to a DETAILED guide for hacking the video drivers? Apparently starcraft 2 won't run without updated drivers and sony hasn't released any since march. I'm beyond upset at this at the moment, the fact that I just paid for a $64 game that I can't play due to sony's bull**** drivers

 

Check this Link

Good luck!

 

I have a question: is there suppose to be a screw in the hole that I've circled in the photo below? Do you guys have one there? Would it be okay to put it there since it has that brown circle around the hole and grounded?

I ended up with an extra screw after taking mine apart and back together. This is the only place I can think of that it goes since all the outside holes have screws.

The photo below is not mine and originally from mlt245 in this thread. I don't know how it would have come out for me or why he took it out. That screw only holds down the motherboard and has nothing to do with the outside cover.

Thanks for your help.

 

It seems the lenovo and sony setup are very similar. It was nightmare to open up my past hp, though my lenovo's top part doesn't come off. I was thinking of giving some air to the keyboard after loosening it up from the computer to get out any hidden dust and other crap.

 

Just bought a new dual band wireless n cisco router this weekend and was all excited to get my laptop working on it.

Thats when I found out the piece of junk atheros wireless card in our sony laptops dosnt work on the 5ghz frequency.

Also I spent alot of time troubleshooting because I noticed if I set my wireless router to only broadcast in 'N' mode then my laptop would not connect. For the longest time I could only get it to connect when broadcasting in "mixed" mode and then when checking the router connections it showed my sony laptop connecting in "G" mode while everything else I own (including my evo smartphone) would connect in "N" mode.

Well after quite a bit of forum searching I didnt find much help other than quite a few complaints of the atheros card being junk.

After a while I started to think maybe it was my encryption settings messing things up. Everything on my network was connecting using WPA2 TKIP and it was all working except for the laptop. So on a whim I decided to just change my laptop to use AES encryption.

Lucky for me I took a stab in the dark and tried that because as soon as I changed the sony over to AES encryption it would connect to my router in "N" mode. Now I can broadcast in only "N" mode with no problems other than the fact everything I own only uses 2.4ghz spectrum .

So anyone connecting your sony (with an atheros, factory default wireless card) wirelessly double check and makre sure it is connecting correctly. If you have a "N" network make sure it is hooking up as "N" and not "G". If you run into problems try what worked for me and hopefully it will help you.

 

Thanks for sharing. What's the speed you get on N mode?

 

I have yet to get more than 34 mbits per second or ~4.2 megabytes per second.

The only way I have tested right now is through a file transfer from my file server and I can sustain a constant 85-90 megabyte per second transfer rate when hooked up through gigabit hardwire.

While that sounds sad its actually about double what I was getting on my previous wireless g router. It was an actiontek gimmie from verizon when I got my FIOS and I was never able to get it so sustain a file transfer speed of even 3 megabytes per second.

FTR my new router is a Cisco Linksys WRT610N

 

I had some of those same problems with the wireless card, thats why I swapped mine out for an intel card bought from a guy on the forums here. It's a great card, in my sig is the model I think

edit: I got that same wireless router too lol

 

Crap. Makes more sense now why I couldn't notice any difference between the Intel Ultimate-N 6300 vs my other laptops (802.11g)

Found this:
if you have a 802.11n router and you have ANY wireless clients connected at speeds below 802.11n (802.11g, e..g.), then the router will throttle ALL its connections down to the lowest connected speed.

 

Lousy, Im going to test that theory tonight when I get home to see if my wireless is truly being throttled. I am currently broadcasting in mixed mode because my xb360 uses a g connection and when I look at my client table in the router it shows me everything connecting as "n" except for the 360 so I was assuming the speeds would be higher for my "n" devices.

I will turn my mixed mode off on the router tonight and broadcast in "N" only and then do another file transfer speed check to see if it is any faster.

Will report back tonight or tomorrow when I have the results.

 

Took longer than I planned but I finally finished my wireless testing.

Testing consisted of copying a 2.2 gigabyte mp4 dvd rip of RoadTrip from my file server to my laptop. To verify no bottlenecks on my server I first completed a wired transfer of same file and it sustained a speed of over 680 Mb/s.

Router: Linksys/Cisco WRT610n
Range: 11 ft(same floor) and through one wall in my house.
Broadcast mode 2.4ghz spectrum:
G only - sustained file transfer speed of 22 Mb/s.
N only - sustained file transfer speed of 44 Mb/s.
Mixed - sustained file transfer speed of 38 Mb/s.

This confirms that my "N" mode is broadcasting and my laptop is auto connecting to "N" when its broadcast but also confirms that speeds are impacted in mixed mode.

Now the review of the WRT610n at TomsHardware showed the WRT610n sustaining wireless "N" 2.4ghz speeds of 50 - 75 Mb/s from 3 different locations. I have not been able to reproduce anything close to that no matter where I position the router or laptop. Im wondering if performance is in any way impacted by the Atheros card in the laptop itself.

 

update:

This laptop w/ the GT330m is AWESOME for Starcraft 2. Although I have a desktop, when my friends come over I connect the laptop to a 1680x1050 Dell 2007WFP monitor w/ a HDMI-> DVI cable and it can run with decent quality settings on.

Very impressed w/ this laptop still, but the battery problem still pisses me off

 

Sony did that for the P series although they advertise it on their site as 5GHZ N, apparently they use different wifi adapters in their models, so never could get 5GHZ N running, so advise to swap wifi card...

Shame really as I get 5-7MB/s via Time Capsule over 5GHZ N compared to 3MB/s over 54G, I've actually hit 10MB/s and that was with only 2 of the 3 antennas connected, I think the faster the CPU the more speed advantage you get.. Also more antennas help,

 

Anyone know where one might procure an extended or even replacement battery for this beast?

 

Sony website.

Laptop battery reseller website.

Ebay.

 

newegg.com has them.

 

I have purchased a skin for my laptop which has an artistic design. But it only covers the top. I also want a skin for th wrist area since mine is white and palm rest area get the most dust and dirt from my hands. The only think I found is this SGP Laptop Wrist Rest for SONY VAIO CW Series - eBay (item 370331013170 end time Sep-03-10 06:56:30 PDT) I don't know how practical it can be. Is there any other website you can recommend me where I can get something protective for the wrist area of my laptop? Thanks.

 

Wouldn't putting a skin on the wrist area trap heat as these areas (the GPU and even the hard disk unless you have SSD) do get very warm.

 

This thread is kinda dead but just wondering if any fellow CW users will be trying to play Final Fantasy 14 online with this puppy?

Im going to load the open beta(should start any day now) on it and see how it goes.

I did the benchmark program they released but no matter how much overclocking I did I was unable to get a score over 1500 on low res settings. According to their website and benchmark results they claim anything that scores below 1999 will not be able to play the game smoothly.

I find this hard to believe since it is based of the same engine that Final Fantasy 13 was built on. That game engine was designed for the PS3 and Xbox 360 which are 5 year old systems and only run at 720p.

We will see.

 

I am going to try FF14. From what I've heard the benchmark's scores are pretty bunk so I'm not worried about that too much. Although if the 18 hour disaster of downloading the client is any indication, we're potentially in for some pain.

 

Has anyone tried their hands on a Vaio Z series? Specifically the one with 512 gb SSD? I know it is very expensive, but I wanted to get a feel about battery life and this switchable graphics thing.

 

Whats the safe GPU temps? I remember before the firmware update I never got more than 70. Now I get 90+ on full load.

 

That sucks! Anyone else getting high temps after update?

 

Is that Celsius or Fahrenheit?

 

I upgraded the firmware as well and I get max 60 C under full load playing SC2 for hours. And I used the EVGA overclocking utility...

 

Hey guys. I have been looking arround for this laptop for some time, so I though I would ask here; anyone know where to get one of these? Preferably with the 330 gfx and high rez screen. Can't seem to find it on the Sony site or eBay.
Thanks a bunch

 

^^^I'll sell you mine for $1150 shipped

 

I was wondering what these are and are they safe to uninstall?
VAIO Content Metadata Intellident Analyzing Manager
VAIO Original Function Settings
VAIO Content Metadata XML Interface Library
VAIO Content Metadata Manager Settings
VAIO Personalization Manager
VAIO Content Monitoring Settings
VAIO Content Metadata Intelligent Network Service Manager

I also uninstalled the VAIO Entertainment thing but the VAIO Entertainment folder is still in my C drive. Is it safe to just delete it or is there a better way?
Thanks!

 

I get 90+ C on load playing the same. My room temps are about 35C but I never got above 60 before the firmware update. Now what? I use EVGA for overclocking too. It's at 48 without load. Should I be worried?

 

Ok it's not just high GPU temps. Reportedly, the CPU goes to 95+ . What should I do? Speedfan shows all 4 cores in the low 70s while CPUID hardware monitor shows both cores above 90. Which is accurate?

 

90+ C for the video card?
Yes you definitely should

 

Stop OC'ing first then see what temps you get.

Can't answer directly to your questions because I don't do what you intend to.

If you are looking to get a clean system (free of bloatwares), the answer is fresh install. Here's a good guide Link

 

I would be worried, mine runs at 58C not overclocked and 60-63C overclocked on SC2 on all high settings...you should definitely see if your fans are gunked up or something...