Sony Vaio Z i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

No, I think it was Zoinks that posted the HP ones and I never saw there was Sony ones. Maybe I should check out Sony's website and see if they have them listed.

As for the first post, I don't think the person that started this thread realized they would have to do that. So it never happened. Maybe we need to start a new owners thread and close this one? We just get a lot of the same questions (which I am at fault for too) because the information is so buried. I went through pages and pages of posts and never could find what I was looking for. I found the links you gave, but it didn't make sense what I was Downloading, so I didn't want to DL it. It didn't talk about drivers at all.

 

To get some of it working you may not need different drivers. Try going to: Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Mouse
Then the Device Settings tab and the Settings... button. Enable the bits you want.

Note: I installed that Scrybe thing, hated it and it didn't enable multi-touch anyway, then uninstalled it and found the above. I presume that I just didn't need the Scrybe junk but maybe it installed different drivers without telling me.

 

My sincere apologies. My ignorance got the best of me.

 

My Z117GG from Hong Kong also flexes. If you knock on it, it sounds like it's empty under.

 

They have single finger scroll, not sure how that wouold even work, but they don't have two finger scroll in the options.

 

Mine does. It may be worth installing that Scrybe thing after all.

 

Fedex lied, kinda. I called before I headed out today. The gentleman I spoke to said it was at the depot. When I got there, the lady at the desk said it was in LA and won't be in until Monday. Apparently they called me this morning and left a VM telling me this. Sure enough, they did.

The dude was wrong, the lady was right and I'm going to spend the day outside. It is too beautiful in Dallas today.

 

Ahh, I see what you're getting at. Yes, that would appear to be normal.

Nope, no 2-finger in the stock driver. One finger puts a scroll zone on the right edge of the touchpad - brush up or down in this area to scroll the page (also a horizontal area at the bottom for side-to-side). It works fairly well. My old SZ also had a similar thing at the top edge for back/forward (brush from the middle to the left or right) but I don't seem to see that option on my new Z, instead I have to use 2-finger flick.


Interesting side done, VAIO Update worked by itself briefly last night and installed 2 Sony updates. When I tried to run it again I kept getting the usual "can't aquire configuration" error.

 

I swap out the VPCZ112GX/S for the VPCZ11CGX/X, wanted the additional hard drive space and the Premium Carbon after spending the week with the 112.
The SonyStyle retailer here didnt charge me the restock, and even gave me the Educational 7% off discount Im happy now to unbox this puppy.

 

That is very nice of them. Congrats on your purchase.

 

thank you JJ.

 

On the touch pad stuff, the default driver on the Z11 has multi touch capabilities already. You just need to turn the options on.

 

Does anyone notice that on battery with the Intel card active the display will be bright with a white window open and then get dimmer if the window is minimized (takes ~ 5 seconds) and you have a dark background.

This is with VAIO automatic brightness turned off and the brightness at about 60%.

The Nvidia card doesn't seem to do this... it seems to be a possible power function of the Intel card.

I have the HD screen but this seems to be more graphics card orientated.

Stefan

 

I was thinking the same. 128 may be too limited. What do you think of the prem. blk. lid compared to the Silver you had? That was cool of SonyStyle for not charging you. Which store was it?

Can you point us to the right direction as to where to turn it ON. So no HP drivers necessary?

 

So what's the current turnaround on CTO orders? I ordered mine yesterday, 3/26.

 

In control panel, click on mouse.
Select Device Setttings. You will see Synaptics touch pad, press settings.
There you will see them: One finger scrolling, pinch zoom, etc.

 

I have mine Z also on the way, hopefully I receive it on monday.
It's preconf model because no ctos here where I live.

It is equipped with only 128GB dual SSD and I was wondering if I later face problems due limited space in my drive. What do you think about adding express card SSD later? Is it going to be slow? I really have no idea about this express card connection. Is there empty place where HDD drive is placed when needed? Can I slide another SSD there and get it also in raid?

Maybe there is better solution for my forthcoming problem, but i just cant think of it...

 

Anyone know of any universal laptop batteries that would work with the new Z and are cheaper? Been looking around but I can't really tell what's compatible.

 

thanks Oscar2.

 

I love the premium carbon the black just looks slicker than the Silver, the silver is nice dont get me wromg but the Black is much nicer.

Yeah it was the right thing to do, they didnt have to but I mean spending 2,300 and change is better then losing the customer entirely.

 

Just received notice of unsuccessful FEDEX delivery of my VPCZ11FHX/XQ to my office (shipping Dept closed Saturday), so have to wait until Monday. I stalked this Lappy until I could pre-order it 2/7. Can anyone confirm what I am assuming, that the "2x256 GB" SSD is really 4x128 in raid 0 with two drives on one physical card? This was my understanding after viewing a YouTube movie from a Sony Engineer (can't find the link now).

Guess I'll find out for sure in less than 36 hours when I get my hands on it.

 

For those who want multitouch touchpad drivers.

I just do a clean install windows and use trackpad driver from here http://drivers.synaptics.com/Synaptics_v14_0_3_C_XP64_Vista64_Win7-64_Signed_default.exe

With that drivers you will get everything you need (two finger scroll, three finger flick etc.)

But i noticed that horizontal scroll is not smooth as use additional two-finger-scroll programs

 

Does anyone here keep their battery in the refrigerator when not in use?

 

New Z Owners:
Thoughts on the new display? How much do you notice the diagonal lines?

 

Thank you!!! This is what I was looking for. Now I just have to play with it and figure out how all the gestures work. I never used any of this stuff before, heck I never had my PC setup to click using this before. I am trying ot figure out three fingers down, that one is hard. Two finger scroll I figured out, just need to get used to it now.

Lots to get used to with this new PC. Windows 7 for one, I never used Vista before and XP I put EVERYTHING back to classic. So now I have to force myself to learn all this user friendly garbage

I don't see them on my new PC unless I get within an inch of the screen and focus REALLY hard.

 

I use a logitech keyboard with my Z, the keyboard has a different settings assigned to its FN buttons. can anyone help me to assign brightness, thermal setting, touchpad disable/enable. I think i have 5 customizable button on my keyboard.

i basically just want to know where can I find those settings and I can assign the key myself =)

Cheers

 

Thanks regarding energy saving options but it still barely reaches 4 hours (display brightness min!) and the control centers shows 5 green dots. All that is left is WLAN...
Which battery runtime do you achieve with what power consumption (green dots in control center)?

 

Interesting to me; the Z has a bit of trouble with my SD card playing HD movies from it in stamina mode, but in speed mode has no trouble at all. I suspect it might not even be a problem in stamina mode if I had an i7 instead of an i5; mind you the SD card is a 32 GB from my HD camcorder. Wonder if someone could check this out on an i7 to see if any problems in stamina mode playing movies from an SD card. I was playing Star Trek HD but I guess any commercial HD movie would do. I thought to transfer all of my movies to the card to free up space on the internal SSD of the Z.

This is using Quicktime player full screen setting. If I drag the movie to nearly a full screen there is almost no glitching at all.

 

When you are playing HD material, maybe intel display adapter cant handle it properly. When you change to speed setting it uses Nvidia 330M to produce the picture.

Although I have no idea, if integrated display adapter should handle HD movies.

 

Well, are you sure there is not some weird power-saving features in stamina mode that may not give the reader/CPU/GPU their full performance? Have you tried use "max. performance" power profile on the stamina to see if it makes a difference?

 

Welcome to the forum and congrats on the purchase.

Yes, the new Z uses specially made Samsung two-sided SSDs, so 512GB is made up of a pair of 256GB drive, and each of them has 128GB on either side. You will see in BIOS that shows four 128GB when you receive yours.

 

Well, first off Quicktime is one of the most horribly coded media players you can get on Windows - incredibly inefficient, especially at demanding HD h.264 encodes. I can encode MP4s (I produce online videos) with a few of the more advanced options that will make it sputter and lag on a high-end quad core system, when Windows Media Player or VLC plays back the same thing smoothly all while utilizing barely any CPU.

However of interest here is that Quicktime is unique in that it only utilizes hardware video playback accelleration in full screen mode; in windowed mode it's software only (ie. purely CPU decoding). But that says that it's NOT your CPU at fault.

There's two settings you should check on whatever power profile Stamina is set to on your system: one is the general Intel video adapter performance level (try raising it if it's not at maximum), and the other is near the bottom and relates to video playback optimization.

I was playing around quite a bit with power profiles last night, and at one point was playing 1080p x.264 encodes, over Wifi from a media server, in Stamina mode with the bare bones Power Saver profile. Everything was set to maximum power savings and lowest performance, and video playback with smooth. However that was with WMP, not Quicktime.

One thing that is bugging me on your report though - you say it only happens in Quicktime, full screen, from an SD card. What about the exact same thing, but from the internal SSD? No problems?

Also exactly which mode are you in? Auto Stamina, or Manual Stamina? Battery or plugged in? They all actually have different characteristics, but by default (if you haven't messed about with the power profiles) there is no difference in the CPU's capabilities between Auto Speed, Auto Stamina and Manual Stamina, whether on battery or AC (they're all 5% minimum and 100% maximum speed by default).

 

It's definitely CPU/GPU issue rather than a problem with your SD card regardless if the CPU is i5 or i7. I'm not sure how quicktime is set up to play HD videos but media players in general normally process videos via purely by CPU power and some have the option of off loading video decoding to the GPU.

If your quicktime is configured to use GPU acceleration for video playback, HD video playback will be affected by how capable the GPU is.

In stamina mode, GPU that is in use is the integrated one by Intel. The intel integrated graphics chip has come a long way but it can still buckle with some HD formats and that's the most probable reason why you're seeing what you're seeing. In speed mode, the GPU selected is the more powerful Nvidia 330m, which has no problems with HD video playback.

If the media player in use relies only on CPU processing for videos, both i5 and i7 will have no issue with HD video playback. Both chips are more than capable of holding their own in HD video processing power.

I use MPC, KMP, VLC media players mainly. MPC is by far the best and I use it the most. I have it configured to use GPU acceleration.

 

That's interesting. I'm not a quicktime user so I wasn't aware of that. MPC is the way to go though. Nothing else comes even close.

 

What Oscar said. Here is a screen cap:

 

Hi,
Have Cisco LEAP encryption for wireless at my office. How can I make it work with the Atheros AR9287 Wireless Network network card provided?

Thanks

 

Were you in a dark room?

If I had to guess the white window is shining light into the light sensor, which makes it think it is brighter in the room so it increases screen brightness. When you close the white window, less light is output from the screen into the light sensor and it darkens.

 

I'm looking for good screen shot software to load on my new Z. Any favorites - Greenshot maybe?

 

a deduction worth of Sherlock Holmes

 

I use Snagit

 

Aww man - of all the luck. Hang in there and enjoy the weekend.

 

Yes, noticed that too - It's like dynamic contrast on modern TVs. To see this effect more clearly, use a dark background with a visible gradient, maximize a white folder window, then minimize and you should be able to see the gradient changing to adapt to the new brightness.

I think it's caused by the power saving options in the Intel Graphics Control Panel, but didn't try deactivating them.


Also, On my i5 540M & Full HD Z in Stamina I'm seeing 4:30-4:50h battery life on 52% brightness and 40Hz, surfing webs with Firefox and with music (WMP) in the background. If I also watch some videos or use Zune software, battery life goes down to ~4:00-4:20h.

 

Sherlock would have noticed that I had mentioned turning off the Automatic Brightness sensor, so that couldn't be contributing to the effect.

Stefan

 

Storing a Z battery in a refrigerator would like storing extra batteries that you won't be using for months and months, right? Otherwise, it serves no purpose.

 

This can be useful in slowing down the internal discharge rate of batteries, like the big bag of AA batteries you buy from Costco, that are just sitting around for months, waiting to be used. It doesn't seem like it would be at all useful for a laptop battery, where you can just recharge it if it is sitting around too long.

 

Btw what software does Sony include for Blu-ray burning?

 

As usual, I agree with Oscar2. This would only be useful for long term storage, although the benefits are minor at best. With lithium ion batteries, just keep it in a cool, dark place.

If you do decide to refrigerate your battery, don't recharge it fully (40%) and put it in a ziplock bag to prevent condensation.

You would also want it to return to ambient temps before using it in your laptop.

 

as far as security software.. what do you guys use or will you use on the Z? Norton, McAfee, Avira, AVG...Etc

 

I use Avira

 

smartinick, I generally agree with you conclusion.
BUT, please let my know what other comparable notebook is out there we can buy instead of the Vaio Z?