Sony Vaio Z i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

the best notebook mouse i've used is the microsoft arc mouse.

brilliant design, i'm a sucker for things that look nice haha.

 

@ anandr: the microsoft arc mouse is very stylish - looks pretty good.. But the Buttons arent well designed..

look @ http://xtremegaming.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/review-microsoft-arc-mouse-black/ review..

 

Dears,

when reading through this thread I can only find the SSD based Z's discussed, does no one else have a HDD version ?

As this config compares the best to Both the Thinkpad and MacBook competitors.

 

A lot of places can't get the hdd version. Here in the u.s. we cannot.

 

I have the HDD version (320GB). Note that with no CD/DVD, the eject button is a customisable "P" button.

 

I kind of wish that all buttons could be configured. I mean what's up with just ONE customizable key? Can't even change the VAIO button from MUTE!

 

Hi,

Would you mind posting your calibration settings? Would be very interested in trying them out, since colour fidelity is important to me!
Thanks in advance!

 

Hear hear!
I have the same problem - bet it's a bug in the vaio control center that will be sorted out in the next release - probably sometime in 2011, if sony is up to their usual standards...

 

Hello,

I read somewhere that it was "easy" to replace the DVD with additional SSD storage. Is this true? If so, where should I look or how is this done.

Thanks

 

Your numbers looks about average. Check here for more results.

This is because the Sony uses Nvidia HD Audio for HDMI. Be happy it works at all, some laptops don't do audio at all.

Yes: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=469244

 

Got tired of waiting for the website to change, so I called Sony in HK. They said they are out of stock (obviously), they dont know when they will be in stock.

The worst though, was they said they have 10 Z's on order!! 10!!! Seriously???

AAArrrghhhhhhh .... I'm going to be waiting forever!!

 

Are all Bluetooth mice having thsi problem? I have not tried minet, yet.
I do not want to go on vacation with one, start playing a game and find it randomly cutting off.

 

Only 320 I have it with 500GB 7200 and a Alu-Silver-Top half

my friend thought it was a slimmed down MacBook, when she looked at it "face" on (Keyboard and Screen)

I removed all the BLOAT WARE and will be doing a clean install just to check... I took the HDD version as it has no CD but a carrier, this will allow me to add a more standard SSD solution (Sony's own is propitiatory) and to reuse the "Sony SSD" space for a traditional SSD as well. I thought this was a much better and future proof way than , lock in to Sony's "custom" solution

 

Seems like there is some kind of problem with bluetooth drivers and power saving management. You will probably need to test it with your mouse model to find out if it works.

 

All right, I will do that after work.

 

i'm just talking from my own experience... i have one in front of me, that i use every day.

what are these bluetooth problems? i'm intending to use a few bluetooth bits and pieces with the Z.

 

I would suggest going to the Sonystyle shop. They are more updated than the call center.

 

Some users reported problem with bluetooth mouse on Z.

Like for example here, although on this thread it was more related to bad mouse drivers.

In short it seems like bluetooth is powering down after some time of mouse inactivity causes the mouse to freez for sohort period of time after it's used again. But apperantly it doesn't heppend for all mouse models.

I don't have my Z yet and I am not planing to use bluetooth mouse since I can spare one USB port for wireles mouse .

 

Not sure I fully understand what you are saying. If you want to put a 1.8" SSD in the space where the the Sony SSD's go, it won't fit. It is too small. Additionally, the SATA connector cable is proprietary.

As of today, I'm not aware of a solution to retro fit ANY SSD into the space Sony is installing their SSD drives.

I used a Microsoft Wireless Presenter Mouse 8000 on the Z11. It worked fine. It did disconnect after a period of inactivity, but I just needed to wiggle it and it would reconnect in about 1 second.

My Z591 does the same thing, as did the Dell Z600 and the Lenovo T400s.

 

true thats why I went for the HDD version , so that I am not limited to some sony solution with respect to SSD. Whilst i mention that I could reuse the space(even if I bought the parts from Sony) why would I, currently I spent a lot less on this rig than going down the SONY SSD route, and I can always fit a standard "Best in class" SSD instead...

At the moment I have 500GB of space for on the road, which is for me much more important than 400mbs through put, as I do normal office type things... give a presentation, read email etc... which is what this rig is targeted at ..

I know you guys see it differently, and thats oK... The Z is a show piece from sony, I just want to use it as a travel and job aid... so to me Battery time and storage (dont need an external HD) is the most important selling point...

 

I would, but I'm on the mainland, in Xi'an.

 

I was commenting on your specific statement:

This cannot be done.

 

and I am sure that it wont take long till some one comes up with an adapter and cable solution and if not I can always buy the 64GB SSD from Sony and the cable from them.... fast boot (ssd) & Larger Storage (256GB SSD or keep the 500HDD) ..... nothing is impossible

 

You are misunderstanding what Zoinks said... The proprietary Sony SSDs are smaller than 1.8", therefore the space left behind is too small for any kind of third-party SSD solution. Period. (unless you start removing the innards to make space, lol )

 

Thanks for the info. The settings were set for max power save on battery and max performance while plugged in. I will try both on max performance and monitor for awhile and see how it goes.

 

Hi to all!

I am considering buying the new Z11Z9 (European version with an i7, 6Gb RAM and a Quad 256Go SSD), but as I shamefully admit not having read all the pages, I still have a few questions left:

1. What booting time can I expect with this configuration, i.e., around 30 seconds, or more ~1 min? What about hibernation?

2. I haven't been able to find the weight of the whole unit with the extended battery. What about the battery life in Stamina mode for both batteries?

3. what about the fans? In a lightweight use, i.e., some internet browsing and a few pdfs as well as Excel speradsheets opened, is it silent?

4. Is there a really important gain in speed with the i7 vs. i5 and the Quad SSD vs. Dual SSD?

If I am not mistaken however, the trackpad has multitouch capabilities.

Thank you for your answers, and once again, I apologize if some of these questions have already been answered.

 

It would be great if you could let me know how I can get to the wireless card inside. Which side of the laptop should I be opening.

 

I used hdTune Pro.

 

Yes, after clean install, the first driver I install is Intel 9.6 driver. The write cache was turn on by default.

 

Why rebuild the RAID? Just remove all the partitions and build a new one. Rebuild only happens on Redundant drives, not RAID0.

 

Ha ha, you are lucky to not too picky about the noise. I live in suburb area, it is pretty quiet at night. However, like i said I am spoiled by X200 T as its fan is dead silent. X200 T is a small computer, however Lenovo is able to make its fan blow out a lot of heat without introducing much noise. If somehow we can combine Sony's Z with Lenovo's fan, that would be a perfect world.

 

Is that true even of some of the other non-standard SSDs?

e.g. Runcore which I've stuck in an eeePC ( http://www.runcore.com/content/prod...images/RCP-IV-S5000-CEth.jpg&GBSize=16GB-64GB)

 

There are a lot of background tasks going on after you used your laptop a while. For example, if you used Media Gallery(I forgot the name of the software), it will start collecting multimedia files in your system and the files shared on the network. Thus you are going to see lower throughput of your SSD RAID.

Don't worry too much about the performance of your SSDs, they are pretty fast and I believe they all are running at a speed they suppose to be.

 

I would love to once I have the chance. If you care about color fidelity, you should purchase a i1 monitor calibrator, it won't cost much (compared to your expensive Z) and each monitor is different thus my ICC may not work well on your screen. The final reason is that you need to calibrate it once a while if you really need color fidelity for serious work.

 

I suspect in Staminia mode, Z will turn off all none essential components if they are not being used for a while. I experienced a weird phenomenon last night when i put Z in staminia mode, I used track pad to browse the web for about 30 min. and then decided to use my USB drive, after plugged it in, Z showed no actions at all, just like I never plugged the USB drive. Then I plugged in my 3G USB modem, same thing happened! Z just shut down all the USB ports.

I was panicked, but decided to switch to other modes, and after switching, the USB devices all detected at the same time.

I wonder if Bluetooth mouse disconnected for the same reason?

 

I ordered mine about an hour ago. Should arrive by Friday, assuming no breakdowns along the way. I'm quite excited!

 

I got chance to borrow a Spyder 3 Elite display calibrating tool from a friend, so i tested it tomorrow with the new Z. I don't really need very accurate colours since i only sometimes use Photoshop Elements 7 ( came with the laptop ) to edit some personal photos before uploading to internet, and very rarely print out anything.

But when you pay almoust 3000 € from a laptop, you may want that everything works tip top, including the screen.

I have full hd display model from Z and before calibration i ran default settings when it comes to screen and colors, expect DPI was set to 100 % ( 125 % default ) and adjust brightness automatically was turned off and brightness set to 100 %.

I ran the calibration in a room without windows ( no natural light ) and in even ambient light. Whole calibration process went smoothly in a 7-8 minutes and in the end the program created a new color profile to windows 7 color managment.

In the end i had a chance to compare this new Spyder color profile to old default profile called "Sony Vaio display profile_D65" with test pictures. As i am an amateur in this subject, it's hard to say that which profile was better or more natural. I think both looked fine, if we talk about color temperatures i would say that Spyder's profile was more warmer and Sony's default profile more cold.

I did this calibration instantly after laptop was turned on, and i have heard that it's advised to keep display on and in use atleast 1-2 hours before calibrating, so i don't know that how much this affects in results.

I have few questions for experts, which we have here in this forum i'm sure.

1. Does Z's screens have already been calibrated in a factory?

2. Could you tell more about default color profile Sony Vaio display profile_D65? Is this factory calibrated profile, how good is it etc?

3. Do you think any color calibration is needed or recommended, even there already is some Sony's own profile?

I hope i know more soon.

 

I guess Runcore drives will fit(and they are cheap), but to customize the cables...I don't know, I can ask hardware manufacturers in Taiwan to make one for all of us just like diy viDock but need sufficient number of orders. I guess it won't be cheap but doable. I'll travel back to Taiwan this May, I can ask them to make some

If anyone with harddive version can post the driver for eject button, that would be great for us who are thinking of replacing DVD with Harddrive.

 

Adding a point... I believe the motherboard interface the Sony SSDs connect to is not a uSATA that provides a port for just one device, it should have direct connectivity to multiple drives. This means that the signals carried on the various pins are probably not the same as that of normal uSATA. If they are all accessing the same port on the motherboard, this must mean the Intel controller ICH8 can do port multiplying, which it does not ( http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm).

I suppose what all these just means is that when designing the new cable, it should based on that of the current SSD cable, not on standard SATA ones.

 

We can figure out the pin out easily by tracing the DVD connector back to the motherboard connector. What I worried about is that even though we are able to customize the cable, we are not able to fit more than two drives in this tiny space. If we are lucky, we can fit two drives using two cables, this will result in around 250MBps throughput and I am extremely happy.

 

Findings about Power Management, if you clean installed Windows 7, then there are total 9 schemes in Z's power management.

There are Stamina, Auto and Performance modes, in each mode there are High Performance, Balance and Power Saver.

In each of the scheme, you can control how the fan performs by adjusting Thermal Controls, they are Performance, Balanced and Silent.

Just to share my findings with everyone.

 

Or you can just buy the laptop with the SSD's

Seems much easier to just remove the optical drive and put in a spinner.

 

@ Karloparlo & Octo-con

Please pm me if the stock is available in HK !

also add the location ;(

 

Not certain where this belongs. How many processes are running without any of your applications open?

 

Just wondering: My Vaio didnt come with noise cancelling headphones. Where can I get these... I dont want the ones with battery clip on the cable. Maybe the fan is bearable with the nc headphones

 

Ever since Logitech started making mice with scroll-wheel that doubles as switch between scroll modes, they are useless. You lose middle button. And, besides convenience in browsers to open link in a new tab, middle button is an absolute must for navigation in 3D modeling applications. By the way, VX is the only mouse where Logitech did it right - scroll mode switch is on the bottom of the mouse.

I currently use v470, which is fine but a bit small. I see that Sony has Bluetooth mouse that looks like a regular size mouse. Wonder what people think about it.

 

dont think so mate this way around its cheaper.... and no lock-in..

 

so searched hi and lo for the fan control, used to be in the Vaio control center ... at least in this build its not available is it some where else ?

 

Install SetPoint and adjust button's action. No big deal

 

no one?