Sony Vaio Z i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

Those are problems that can be solved with drivers/updates. No product is perfect

 

Not all of them are fixable in drivers/updates, overheating cannot be resolved unless you throttle down CPU.

If you pay $3000 for a HDTV, will you accept under some situations your TV will be flickering, overheating, and becomes noisy? I konw I won't.

 

And also completely untrustworthy. Not only does the "Recomended" show that whoever wrote it can't even spell, but they also claim that the i7-620M can do 8 simultaneous threads, which is complete bollocks. It's a dual core CPU, just like the i5-540M, and can schedule four threads in the pipeline, and run two of them at a time.

 

Should the laptop be able to bitstream this?

 

The price difference between the i5 and i7 is only $54 on the Canadian site for US I know its more. Yet, I agree there should be no problem with the i5 in HD, I still think for future resale value and any future demands the i7 would be a safer bet.

 

Urrr..I thought you can add a BluRay drive right? No DTS while watching Blue Ray? What kind of BlueRay experience is this?

 

The Japanese kind....

 

On the gray-colored model, does the color of the palmrest differ from the rest of the body? I noticed in some pictures it is more or less the same but in others the palmrest looks darker.

 

It's not so much about not wanting the SSD. Speaking for myself, you (meaning I) begin to wonder how a perfect laptop could still have huge issues with the SSD in respect to TRIM/GC. I will still make the purchase, because the Z has far more pros than cons. I just question why other countries would be offered options that are not being offered here in the USA like HHD for example. Had Sony offered those options across the board, I don't think you will be reading so many posts from people that have concerns.

Question?
What would happen to the average consumer who did absolutely nothing about this issue with the SSD even if they did manual back-ups of their drive, say 2 yrs. from now, and has fully saturated the drive? Will it still be faster than a HHD that's been defraged?

 

I believe the color one perceives depends on the lighting condition & the angle one is looking at the notebook. This may have to do with the fact that the palmrest block (with the touchpad section) is made of a different material to the base palmrest chassis (section that holds the keyboard.

 

Only issue I have with getting a Z with a HDD then swapping out for a SSD, is that one has to fork over money for the HDD model then replace it with a SSD, costing even more and for some, throwing away a HDD and not having a single SSD with TRIM to begin with from Sony is an oversight and a bad one from where I stand.

Others don't mind switching out a HDD for a SSD, but for me, its still a waste of some money

 

Thanks. I've seen some versions of this in black rather than gray. I would opt for that one. Any ideas on when it will be released?

 

Interesting - the Geek Montage has edited their review

First, they updated their images to look more like the current Z, and added this:

Second, they updated the battery life test to say that the I5-540m lasted 8 minutes longer (not shorter) than the I7-620m.

Third, they updated their RAID imaging description with the following:

Not sure what he meant by "restore your array to that drive" or "This method works only if you have enough space on both of your raid drives" - is he thinking in terms of RAID1?

I didn't check for other changes.

So good for them for addressing the issues, but I have to say, it's hard for me to really trust the review. I don't like ambiguous statements like:

What was their test? To put their hand by the exhaust port and see how it feels?

or

How many percentage points? Over how long?

-Peter

 

Forget resale value unless you are planning on flipping it or something. Two or three years from now these things aren't worth enough to make that any kind of a useful consideration.

 

For reads, yes. For writes, no.
There will be "stalling" during normal use, but likely the blame will be placed elsewhere.

As an example, if the latency jumps to 1 second for small writes, and you visit a web page with 50 elements, it may take 50 seconds while it repeatedly updates the cache and database of browsed items. And the browser will be blamed (SDD users have already done this with Firefox).

Or when you open a folder with a hundred small images, and the OS tries to write thumbnails for all of them. And you wait several minutes. The OS will be blamed, not the drive.

Or when you try to install a game with 50,000 small files, and it takes hours. The game will be blamed, not the drive.

 

I'll be swapping out my HDD eventually - I won't be throwing it away though - planning to stick it in an enclosure and use it for backups.

 

lol, they obviously checked their analytics and found this thread and realised not everyone is as dumb as their readers. utter loss of credibility, thank you and goodnight.

until i see notebookcheck.de publish a review (or perhaps notebookreview.com - but it depends who gets the gig) i'll continue to piece together info from the threads right here

death to shoddy, slapdash and vague journalism

 

What do you guys think about the Glossy premium finish? Do you think its cheap looking?

 

Hey come on, I think he tried to do a good job. Overall he did a pretty good job. It was not worse than other reviews out there. Also, at least he tried to address our specific questions about ssd's.

 

I personally like it. It's like the finish on the Cyber-shot TX7.

 

Really how about one year from now? For only $54 difference on the Canadian site its peanuts for me personally. Bottom line you'll get more money with an i7 CPU.

 

Good luck on that

 

Um...I think it's obvious that he doesn't even have the laptops and are just making stuff up. Look at his 3dmarks and cinebench benchmarks. He lists min, average, and max numbers. What does that even mean? Did he run the tests a bunch of times and got such huge variations across them? It's very improbable that on the same machine there's such big variations in each benchmark. Head over to http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-330M.22437.0.html and the answer becomes clear. He just lifted the numbers from notebookcheck's benchmarks of the respective GPUs, changing the numbers a bit to make the forgery not completely obvious, but simple statistical analysis will show that the numbers are too close for it not to be a straight up copying. What's really telling is that he doesn't even realize that notebookcheck's GPU benchmark numbers are for a range of different systems with the same GPU, thus the huge variation between min and max. He just used those numbers as if it was for a single machine!

And it's not just this review, all of this guy's reviews on geekmontage use these stolen numbers. He appears to not have run a single benchmark himself. I wonder if he even has any of the machines he reviewed. This is awful not just because of the shoddy journalism and lack of integrity, it's also awful because he didn't even fake things very well. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence can spot the problem. I really hope nobody based their purchasing decisions on any of these reviews.

 

SonyStyle.com pre-configured orders will probably be shipping tomorrow! The status of my order just changed and the estimated delivery date is tomorrow.

 

When did you order?

 

February 26th, through the EPP store.

 

Hey Buddy,

Check this site out, they are not cheap.
http://www.geekstuff4u.com/notebooks/performance/sony-vaio-z11-series.html

 

Interestingly, mine also lists tomorrow (and I only ordered yesterday)

 

I think I've worked out the answer to my question about Expresscard 2.0. The intel blurb says wrt HM57 chipset:
Offers up to 2.5GT/s for fast access to peripheral devices and networking with up to 8 PCI Express 2.0 x1 ports, configurable as x2 and x4 depending on motherboard designs.

However, Expresscard 2.0 specifies 5Gbit (same as GT?) for full speed (faster than USB3.0 or Firewire 3200) so those interface cards will operate at full speed. A USB3 card plugged into the vaio will only run at 2.5GBit.

To put this into context, assuming you have 50GB of data, current expresscard at full speed (about 300MByte/s) will take almost 3 minutes. At USB3 speed, it'd take 1.5 mins, so I think Expresscard 1.0 is still plenty fast; USB3 may only run at half speed but even SSD has a hard time pushing that. I think we'll see a lot more external graphics cards though when USB3 becomes popular.
http://www.laptop-junction.com/toast/content/usb-30-superspeed-laptops-and-notebooks


A quick search also reveals that USB3 won't be "out" until 2011:
http://www.google.com/search?q=usb3+2011
USB3 and Expresscard 2.0 are also somewhat intertwined, which could explain why we have not seen much expresscard 2.0 making rounds.

 

Waiting in line on the phone right now to buy the Z... let's see how this whole 15% thing goes...

 

Don't think so, I think it will be a fingerprint magnet though...

 

I got a 20% discount!! Details coming after I get off the phone...

 

I'm have no experience with any of the exporting vendors, sorry. The site looks fine to me, though. If you get the new Z, won't you get the included noise-canceling headphones? They are much more convenient because they don't have a separate battery box. Of course, they can't be used with other devices, though.

You can't do this if you swap the drive. Also, Sony really does install a lot of extra services and unnecessary software. Dozens are programs are installed and many registry settings are added/changed, judging from the extracted recovery partition. Just uninstalling unnecessary apps from the control panel will do something, but not completely erase all services and records. I only installed probably 15% of the originally installed software when I did a clean install.

1-2. I haven't tested the HDMI yet, so I can't comment on this. Perhaps later I'll try with my projector, which has the same native resolution (1080p).
3. I had one BSOD after I plugged in my Fujitsu scanner. I think that's attributed to the scanner driver. I also had the machine lock up when going into suspend. I had this same problem with my previous Z, but since it only happened once on the new one (out of at least 15+ times going into suspend by closing the lid), I won't research it any further yet. I read somewhere it is related to Adobe Acrobat. Apart from these two issues, the laptop has had no stability problems. As I tested, I could not even get the laptop to throttle with continuous 100% CPU and 100% GPU activity. During this time, the fan even backed off its highest speed.
4. Unless the calculation is GPU-accelerated, there's no reason to do it in Speed mode. Again, I posted my benchmark heat numbers on a worst-case scenario, and can say the underside of the Z never gets uncomfortably warm (unlike that of the Macbook Pro and Dell M4400 I've used). In fact, the area underneath the palmrest was almost cool to the touch during the tests. As for the fan, yes it gets loud during high activity, and louder than that of the current Z.
5. Unless Sony specifically states it has bitstreaming support (as they do with the PS3 Slim), I wouldn't expect it. Desktop cards are only now barely starting to support it.

My recommendation is to buy a cheap USB 2.5" SATA external enclosure and use the HDD for backing up the SSD.

There is no gray model; only silver and black, unless you're talking about the custom lids.

 

Does the new Vaio Z support dual external monitors?

 

How is the fan noise during regular day-to-day tasks such as web surfing, listening to music, streaming videos on youtube, etc..? and how does it compare to the fan noise on the macbook pros? I've owned a macbook pro before and really like how the fan noise is barely audible while doing non-intensive tasks.

 

I told the sales associate that I wanted a discount and had heard that it was going up to 15%. She told me I could do it if I bought the extended warranty and some accessories, but I didn't want any of the latter and told her I was buying a $3000 laptop. Then she said that she could definitely apply it in that case since it was that much and because I was configuring it (I guess most of the orders are for the ones that are already configured). My total was $3,117.37. I got the 3 year accidental damage, i7, 192 SSD, 6 GB RAM, Carbon Fiber, Blu-Ray, and the Backstage VIP Protection Suite. What - why that last one? Well, I was a little chatty and told her my last laptop was stolen. When we got down to the software portion of the order page, she asked me if I wanted to buy the protection suite because law enforcement can find your laptop if it's stolen, but I said no because I was already over-budget. Then she said she wanted to give it to me for free, and so she did just that. Then when she tried to apply the 15% discount, it wouldn't let it her knock-off the $100 for the software for some reason. She tried to calculate what percentage the $100 off could be, but gave up and said she'll just bump me up to 20%. And so she did! She was very nice and very human, and I'm happy it all worked out so wonderfully. She said it'll ship out from the warehouse in San Diego on the 23rd, and since I'm only two hours away, it should probably get here within a day or two after (because of the engraving I got too).

 

I think a lot of people don't understand the problem with the lack of TRIM.
You're basically getting a high end premium drive which is going to eventually have problems which makes it worse than a normal HDD.

It's not throughput which is causing the problem, it's the random access speed which is most important to everyday use. [Which car would you buy? A car with stupendous top speed like 300km/h but not allowed to take corners faster than 10km/h or a normal car with a top speed of 200 but you can take your corners at the reasonable 50km/h? That's the problem with lack of TRIM now.]

 

OMG Jon!
Amazing, 20 percent off!

I can't get the blu ray option here in Australasia. Congrats!

 

*laugh*

Peter.
Love the way you put it.
Put their hand by the exhause port and see how it feels?

It's one thing for me to be raising the very real concern about lack of TRIM and another for those chaps to be making a joke out of serious objective reviewing.

Already, I have come to long disregard review sites who simply pump benchmark numbers without even thinking about what they want to test and how to achieve the test [i.e. No experimental design], these jokers are worse.

 

SurferJon, You are my new Hero.

Also, that's cool to know they ship out of San Diego. I live in San Diego. I wonder if I can arrange to just stop by there when mine is ready and pick it up...

 

No, I will be using these over-the-ear headphones during traveling. I travel a lot on business trips and these noise cancelling headphones are a huge help - especially for longer international trips.

I believe the earphones that come with the Z are the lower-end models (approx $50 or thereabouts) that are ear-canal phones. I have no experience with ear-canal phones, to be quite frank. The higher-end products cost way more than that. The Sony high-end ear-canal version costs $300 (MDR-NC300D) and these over-the-ear phones cost $450 (MDR-NC600D).

 

Have you seen it? it's definitely more of a high gloss finish, more so than the cybershot TX7

 

It's not as quiet as the MacBook Pro on idle, but on the other hand the new Z much, much cooler to the touch. Apple always sets very low default fan speeds at the expense of heat. The Z's fan is always audible in a silent room, but it's not loud on idle. I'm not bothered at all by it, but I also spend a fair amount of time in a server room.

 

wow 20%! was the final price of $3,117 including tax?

 

OK, now I'm ticked off at Sony Canada - most I can talk them down to is a measly 5.3% on the value of what I wanted! They don't even care about adding on the extended warranty (what's up with that, that's like a pure profit item.)

Tried an alternative route of going to an actual SonyStyle store, and they won't deal at all on computers.

 

Yeah, that's what was billed.

That's weird. One of the first things I asked the lady was where she was located and she said Canada. You would think they would treat people from their own country better than an American. XD

 

Heya, so are you getting any more battery life by setting the refresh rate to 40Hz?

 

Yeah, my guy said he was in Toronto. I suspect the call center is from the Sony Canada head office, which is literally a 5 minute drive from my home.

Maybe I need to keep calling back until I get a woman - another Canadian managed to haggle 10%, and it was from a woman as well...

You need to get your rep's local extension number so I can call direct!

 

any idea what the sales reps name is? i tried to call a couple of times and everyone i talked to said they couldn't do more than 15%. I told them a friend of mine got a 20% discount and they guy asked if i could give my friends name and number and he would check on his order and see what he could do, i told him i didnt want to give his info out.

 

Currently, about 45 minutes more or so.