Sony Vaio Z i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

Yes, I've had my new for Z for a few weeks now (I think I was second after StefanB in receiving it, I count myself lucky.) I WAS going to open it but then chickened out (for now) and since there are significantly more skilled laptop surgeons on the board (yes Zoinks, I'm looking at you ) I think the answer could be provided there !

...although I will probably open it sooner than later, by cheer curiosity

I need to change my sig too, my new Z has become my full time laptop... I will reformat and open my old Z and start messing with Gobi chips from Ebay soon-ish

 

Shiny and scratch proof...

 

Woah, how did you do that? Not the car wax idea I suggested many posts back?

 

If the picture above is any proof, I was able to reassemble the LCD screen.

Somewhat frustratingly, there is a small magnet inside the screen shroud next to the webcam. The magnet is how the laptop knows the lid is closed.

It fell out and I didn't notice it was missing until I tried to close the screen to put the machine to sleep. I'll have to pull it apart again, but I need to anyway to complete the project I'm working on.

I also disassembled the keyboard to remove the palm rest. Pretty easy, but I wouldn't recommend unless you have some experience pulling things apart.

I WOULD NOT recommend disassembling the LCD. It's very tricky and requires some unscrewing at odd angles.

On a scale of 1-10 for difficulty:

• Removing the Memory bay: 1
• Removing the main keyboard assembly: 3 (keep track of what you've pulled out)
• Removing the DVD drive: 3
• Removing the palm rest: 8; The tricky bit is reinstalling the touchpad buttons. It took me a while to figure out how to restore the buttons to their original state (click feel)
• Removing and disassembling the LCD: 9; wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy.

The last two are very risky. The chance of breaking things is very high.

Buddy,

How did I do this? Very slowly

Waxing the palm rest is a very bad idea. Too much powder with too many tight crevices.

For those with the glossy carbon lid, waxing should afford you some protection from minor scratches. It's also very easy to do. With the right kind of wax or polishing compound, you might be able to remove light scratches as well. Not sure it would help with fingerprints, but wouldn't be any worse either.

My strategy is to avoid scratches altogether.

 

Has there been any progress on attaching multiple monitors to the Z? It looks like for attaching more than one display, it's necessary to either use the USB, firewire, or ExpressCard slot.

 

Zagg should just release the invisibleshield for the new Z. I use it on all my gadgets and let me tell you, the thing is expensive but indestructible: http://www.zagg.com/invisibleshield/index.php?intcmp=top_nav

Any of the current VAIO on their site is 13" so that it could fit the new Z?

 

Ok that's worse than my worst bout of sickness I was wearing ear plugs this one time when the plane was descending, and I think that affected the inner ear adjustment thing. The next thing I know, I could feel the lack of blood reaching my face and limbs, and my hands could not unclench. After the landing, a lady stared at my face for a while (I know it's completely white), but said nothing. I mentally gave myself a medal for not throwing up

I get motion-sick so easily that even third person didn't work for me. Things are much better now with sea-bands

I'm not sure I'll regret asking, but, that's like 8 female characters there, what exactly do you do with them? I've come across people who sell their characters, on WoW etc...

Perhaps a sealant like Zaino is better, lasts longer

That was my first thought when I saw the palm rests, my iPhone is wrapped with that.

 

Zagg is historically slow with new laptops. They don't add them unless somebody sends a laptop to them for fitting.

 

When updating firmware for Intel SSD, it requires writing bootable CD. I wonder, if instead it is possible to use bootable USB? Anyone tried?

 

I just received my Diy ViDock yesterday wishing for a magical moment of having an external portrait display. It turns out it did not work at all. I think the problem is the conflict of driver for the onboard 330m and the expresscard attached 7900GTO. The system can detect the card with no problem, the problem shows up when the driver is installed. The notebook resolution reduces to 800x600 and a few conflicting devices shows up in the device manager. It is really messy, Wifi does not work, Intel HD cannot be detected. The system's mode switching is also gone. What is even more intriguing is the 7900GTO is gone after driver installation. And the 330M although is in the device list, you are not able to switch to it at all.

I had to restore the system to return to the original state. It is lucky the restore works great.

Sony custom made so many stuff to make Z possible, even the driver is custom made, and that is the main reason cause the ViDock to fail.

I spent $107 for this experiment and it is all gone...

 

I wouldn't give up as yet. If you get it to work, a lot of people would be interested. I for one would be one of those people...

Can you put a newer graphics card in? Does the 7900 even support windows 7? It would be 3+ years old now?? From my understanding you can almost put any card you like in the case right?

 

http://sewelldirect.com/ViDock-2-Ex...se&cvsfa=1306&cvsfe=2&cvsfhu=53572d3232363837

At the bottom of that page in the review the customer said he couldn't get nvidia cards to run at all, but the ATI cards ran perfectly. Maybe try an ATI card? If it wworks, I would get one instead of a docking station!

 

Nope, noise cancelling earplugs were not included. But I was expecting that. It's kind of funny how you only get the laptop and NOTHING more for your 2500 €. I mean you even have to make the recovery discs yourself. With my Asus U6Sg I received a second battery, a BT mouse, a laptop bag as well as a leather pouch... all for less than half the money And two years ago it was also quite the mobile powerhouse, not unlike the Z. Unfortunately Asus hasn't really updated the design since then.

 

I have tried an ATI 5670 card in the VillageTronic version of the ViDock.

After a lot of fooling around (I can't even remember the steps), I got it to work ... sort of.

Aero didn't work. The USB ports didn't work. Couldn't boot with the unit attached. Etc. Pretty flaky. Not sure what I'll do. At the moment I just don't have the time to fool with it. Probably send it back and try again later.

Tried an nVidia 210 card and got exactly the same results as posted earlier.

 

well at least it sort of works Maybe after some hackery someone can get it to work better

 

There's a fellow around called Nando4 who's very into this stuff. I will try to send him some info, but just can't get to it right now. But check him out.

 

By the way, it pays to set a restore point before fooling with this stuff!!

 

hahah I will take note. THe 330GT is a good card, and should be fine for a long time, but it would be nice to know, that If I was so inclined I could whip out a nice fast desktop card and shove it in the size for greater performance. I wonder if this would also work on the S and Y series? That would amake those models all that more tasty as well.

 

Battlefield Bad Company 2 works well only on 1366 x 768 with minimal details. And even then smoke scenes are very slow.
Maybe I should change some settings?

 

Hi Guys, where exactly can I get this "one click internet" program from ?

I've looked on the Sony UK site and cant find it?

 

I found it after I changed my laptop model int o something else. Let me see if I can find it again.

Here In WWAN connection manager section...

 

Hello,

I will buy sony Z on uk sonystyle shop and they are offering now free cpu upgrade.
I planned to configure my laptop with i5 540M. But now its the same price as i7 620M.
I just dont know what to choose. I heard that i7 will eat more energy and produse more heat. So what do you advise for me???

 

ok no matter they writte "Available finishes" so i think it was limited offer

 

I just tried selecting the i7 on the UK site, and it says 'configuration not available', so maybe that's why it's free...

 

I don't think that there is a noticeable difference. The i5 and the i7 are basically the same. The additional power which is consumed due to the higher speed will be - in the long term - balanced by the fact that the i7 can return to a lower speed earlier (which also applies to the produced heat).

For computationally intensive tasks you will be on power supply anyways.

Nevertheless I would go for the 540 M, as the performance gain won't pay the additional cost - unless it's for free (as in your case) or you are forced to do so because you have to buy one of the preconfigured models as Sony is to dorky to allow CTO for your country (greetings from Austria).

 

I played Star Trek online at native resolution. I had no problems related to the Z.

 

I am downloading Acronis True Image Home 2010, a free trial cloner for my Z.
Does anyone clone-backup their PC's and is this a good choice? Any advice appreciated.

 

I still use my Acronis True Image Home 11 boot disk for backing up partitions and securely erasing disks. Has never let me down...

 

Regarding ViDock, it could be an issue with Z's ExpressCard slot. On my Z690 I tried using Indigo IOx (ExpressCard audio card) and it would not work neither in Windows 7 x64 nor in Windows XP. The same card, with the same drivers works in ASUS M50. Going to try that card in the new Z when I get the latter tomorrow.

 

It's funny seeing House in armor The modelling looks pretty good! Chun-Li looks really Asian. I'm not a graphics guy, but from your comments it seems like the facial characteristics are obtained via texture objects built from photos, and not a certain set of parameters entered into a model (e.g. constraining parameters within a particular range gives us an Asian-looking face)? I have no idea how advanced graphics is in this area...

 

I didn"t try with a bootable USB, but with an external optical drive, the intel program can't find the internal hdd. I think it has something to do with ahci/ata mode in bios but we can't modify anything but VT in it

 

It's a bit of software called Singular Inversions SI Facegen. It has the feature of allowing you to input a photo of a face.

Duncan the Highlander, SI Facegen 3D render:

Imported into the game of Oblivion:

Now I can take my hobby anywhere on the Z without shoulder strap stress. Bunches of fun.
Mind you, it takes much work and not all faces will translate well; It takes further photo editing work before importing the face into the game if you want a good result; and that takes experience; it's a challenging hobby for me.

 

We use FaceGen on Out of the Park, a text-sim baseball game. We finally got the mod to input anyone's face. Pretty interesting stuff going on.

www.ootpdevelopments.com

 

Thanks. So I just wonder if there is some way to update my Intel SSD firmware without taking it out of the notebook and installing on some other computer. I really dont want to go thru with it... I think my current firmware supports TRIM, so dont know if there are other benefits of updating it... Btw, does it make sense to install RST 9.6.0 on a single Intel SSD x-25?

 

You can if you're gonna ''hack'' the bios -> http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=473226&page=9 (see page 1). But your warranty will be gone tho. (and you could brick it xD)

 

I'm having a bit of a problem with my Z. Most of the time, it connects to my wifi router but I can't access the internet. Sometimes it'll connect and work just fine (and it was working perfectly for the first few days), but most of the time now it'll connect to either one of my wireless routers, but I can't use the internet at all... I've tried rebooting, restarting the router, switching wifi on/off, doesn't seem to help. Anyone have an idea of what's up?

In other news, the damn thing froze on me again yesterday; I was on some website and I left it sitting there for a few moments when the screen went grey and I eventually had to do a hard reboot. I'm obviously not too happy with it at the moment.

 

Hello everyone,
I'm planning on buying a new laptop, and I settled on the vaio Z because of how light it is, but also because it has the power to handle cpu/gpu intensive applications (i'm an Aero engineering student, so I do a lot of CAD, matlab etc).

I'm only wondering as to the timeframe in which i should buy this laptop. My old laptop works fine, but i'm going to have to do a lot of commuting next year and those 2.5 kg are killing my back.

I understand that the sony doesn't have USB 3.0, and i read that that's because Sony Engineers where not able to add an extra usb controller within the laptop (space constraints). So that means that the sony Z will probably not have a usb 3.0 port until usb 3.0 intel chipsets come out.

If these chipset come out only next year, i'm gonna go ahead and buy this machine now. However, I don't wanna be stuck with usb 2.0 if sony comes out with a refresh with usb 3.0 in a couple of months!

I'm also wondering whether a new docking station might come out soon and give non portable usb 3.0 capabilities to the laptop.

In a nutshell, when do you guys think we will be seeing usb 3.0 in the sony Z ? and is a usb 3.0 docking station possible?

Thanks

 

Tou could get a usb 3 expresscard.
http://gizmodo.com/5416428/whats-wrong-with-a-usb-30-expresscard

 

Is it the new Z? Have you tried it in other Wifi areas? do other WIFI gizmos/laptops work fine at home?

 

Yup, the new Z. I haven't tried it anywhere else, but everything else at my house - my other laptops, even my iphone - work just fine. Like I said, the first couple of days wifi was working just fine. But now it connects to the router but I can't use the internet...

 

I think a major theme for technological development from the point of view of average consumers is "realism". We've got 3D movies, now we're getting 3D TVs at home. There's a great deal of underlying tech work going on just so we can see things as though we're physically there. Since this sort of interface is the most intuitive, it probably has the highest potential to be the key portal to everything we would like to do. E.g. instead of pointing and clicking at a mouse, we can 'touch' a 3D object to activate it.

Say for instance I want to look around a car I'm interested in. Right now I go online and click a couple of pictures but it doesn't feel... real. Imagine I've got some sort of holographic projector and there's a 3D car projected in front of me. If I can 'move' the car around, just like I would with a (really light) car and view it from different angles, or blow it up so that I can see myself sitting inside it, the experience can be so much better.

Getting to be part of the key portal would be a great thing, not least because recognition comes easily (you can see your work, it's in-your-face sort of thing ) I think it would be really interesting to ride this particular wave, there shouldn't be a lack of demand for specialists in this area. I guess it would begin with games, then spread to other areas of our lives...

 

I reported some posts back the frame rates of HD movies (downloaded from Apple) showing full screen video was a rather choppy deal. After a restore of C drive and drivers (not a system restore from the Start menu), I notice the HD Star Trek movie works fine in Quicktime player; this is while playing the HD movie file from a SD card inserted into the Z. This is really cool. The HD card is an extra one from my Panasonic HF100 HD Camcorder; 32 GB. I can now store and play HD movies from the SD card now hopefully without a hiccup; I will test it further.

Jamsy I would take it to a Sonystyle store if there is one nearby unless a system restore would help, if you can remember the last system restore that it worked fine? Have you done any earlier backups?

 

FYI, I just tried to order a Signature Z over the phone from Sony Style US and was told that they're out of stock and can't be ordered. I had started the conversation saying that I expected at least a 15% discount, and the rep gave me the spiel about a couple of rogue reps having been fired for giving excessive discounts. I explained that I had read on this forum of numerous people receiving such discounts--too many to be explained by a couple of reps--upon which he asked whether I planned to buy the extended warranty. I did, but then he notified me about the Signature Z's being out of stock. I hope it's not long, but he had no idea.

 

I do not have an Ati card laying around, I'll go to BestBuy to get a card on Friday to give it another shot. I am thinking of testing if it accepts my PCIE Raid controller card, that would be interesting to hook up 8-drive Raid-5 at home.

 

Is it still getting an IP address assigned by the wireless router? It's not a firewall issue, is it?

 

I did, that's how I restore the system. I was surprised MS is able to make restore right. I did two backups, one is made by Acronics, the other is Win7 restore.

 

Is this every model Signature Z? Which Signature were you interested in? Glossy? Metal Mosaic?

 

I have no problem with Option Wireless GT Ultra 3G modem expresscard, it works great.

By the way, I am wondering why people are so into the embedded 3G modem? I use a lot of 3G with USB modem or Expresscard modem, they both works great and convenient. It is upgradable too. You can get a Sierra Wirelss USB 885 from New Egg for less than $40 with GPS, and you can use it with any laptop even with iPhone's 3G card. Isn't it more convenient?

 

I'm not really interested in the glossy premium carbon, but that's the only US model with the 1080 screen. According the website, the other out-of-stock model is the silver with the i%-520 CPU ($1899).