Sony Vaio Z i5/i7 Official Owners Thread

What about the headhones jack? Doesn't that work? Or am I missing your intention?

 

i wasn't clear, sorry - i was referring to the docking station.

it has all the ports i need except an audio jack. so an audio jack/USB adapter (i.e. sound card, thanks todd) would solve that, as the docking station has ample USB ports.

 

There are speakers that simply plug directly into USB.

 

indeed, but usually not very good ones.

i already have logitech Z-2300s, which use the usual audio cable.

 

I have Logitech Z-10 USB speakers, excellent sound indeed.

 

my friend has those, they're fair enough.

each to their own i guess - i'm more into full-size speakers with a sub, bit more oomph.

 

This should work: http://us.store.creative.com/Sound-Blaster-XFi-Go/M/B002651ZNI.htm

or this: http://us.store.creative.com/Sound-Blaster-XFi-Surround-5.1/M/B0017QQQAE.htm

 

thanks mate! i actually was doing a bit of reading just before, and stumbled across the X-Fi Go as well. looks perfect for my purposes, and seems it improves the sound a bit as well.

plus it's not overpriced, like most other electronic things down under!

 

I wonder if anyone got some kind of discount in europe (espically in germany) - those agents are pretty tough.

 

they are not allowed to give discounts in germany anymore.

i bought its few days ago when there was 10% discount @ t-online
http://www.mydealz.de/12709/10-rabatt-auf-windows-notebooks-im-t-online-shop/

 

Check also TurtleBeach Audio Advantage series of USB cards, especially if you have an amp with optical or S/PDIF input (TurtleBeach USB cards have TOS-link out). And their Micro or Amigo card would probably be half the price of Creative yet give you great quality. Good driver support too, even for older cards.

 

heard that many times the last few days

 

I've ordered virtualy the lowest spec Z that Sony offer, no WAN, no TPM, HDD version with the full HD panel. (I'm all about that panel )
I managed to get 5% off of the Z in the UK on my first attempt which payed for the faster and larger 7200rpm 500GB HDD. Tried a second time and was only offered 2.5% discount. Made the purchase at 5%. After reading that the Sony Style website was offering free upgrade to the 540 CPU (£30 difference) I rang the sales staff and explained that I would like the upgrade BUT could I also get the 5% discount... really pushing it I know... and was told that they "couldn't offer discounts on top of offers", so failed miserably. I'd also rec'd an email telling me that my Z was being built and to be frank with you I decided that the £70 discount/upgrade was a better deal than £30 cpu upgrade plus additional 3 weeks waiting for a brand new order.

Basically the staff seemed to be more likely to give discounts on the higher spec CTO's and/or if you also take some additions such as bags, docking station etc. I feel like I got what I wanted at the end and didn't in anyway feel that I'd missed out. I was utterly on the fence as to whether I was gonna go with the Z, an Apple or maybe a HP or Lenovo and said as much to the sales staff. When it came down to it the size, weight and screen on the Z (plus its a PC) won me over. Nothing any of the competition (at present) can offer come close on these. She ships anyday from tomorrow onwards, I feel like I'm 7 again, it's my birthday tomorrow and I've a sneeky suspicion that my parents have bought me that huge Jet Fire transformer i've been on at them about for the last 6 months.

 

I placed my order last week on a "top" Z model: i7, 6GB Ram, Hd screen, large battery, 192 GB SSD, 3G, Silver but no way to obtain any kind of discount, SonyStyle offered me 5% discount on accessories (bag, earphone, mouse, etc.), on those materials I am not interested.

 

I realy was on the fence with my decision and discussed many issues with the sales staff over the technical specs, especially those of the HD screen. I think it is this that swayed it for me. I can't say for sure that the discount is more likely with the accessories or extended warranty but the staff did question about whether I was purchasing any of these before they would see if they could manage anything. Aftewards I asked if the staff had much leeway with regards to discounts, I received a very definite "very little" reply. I won't go into too much more detail than I already have as I realy don't want to muddy the water here but it certainly is your right to try and negotiate a discount/extras with sales staff. I've worked in both cold/warm selling environments in the UK and it is generaly accepted that with some people a little give is needed in order to make that final sale.

 

I talked to several (german) agents, tried it many different ways - essence "i would like to, but i am not allowed to (anymore)".

 

Anyone here have the Core i5 540m model experiencing jitter on one finger scrolling?

Sites with images like engadget can stutter for a bit which i was really surprised. Even forums like this one may have a few hiccups if i'm scrolling up/down spontaneously. My old desktop with an older e4300 cpu and 2gb ram on a native 2560 resolution performed just as smooth than the performance on my vaio. It's on speed mode and set to "maximum performance". I still have not installed any software except for firefox and microsoft security essentials. This is a freshly formatted vaio with windows 7 ultimate.

I did not expect this kind of performance from a more powerful cpu than my previous one. What's going on here?

 

Maybe it's the touchpad? I was experiencing something similar, but disabling chiralmotion and increasing the scrolling area a bit fixed the problem for me.

 

BTW, fan in my Z sounds like this:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=K51WQN2A
What about other users? does anyone else's Z sound like this? maybe worse? better?

 

Yup, mine sounds the same.

 

Just played Dragon Age on my z on high details and it runs smooth. Amazing power for a light weight portable. I got used to the fan noise. I can only hear it at home when its really quite. Its a powerful working machine and good to hear that its doing its job .

 

The fan in my new Z is a lot quieter than my 1st-gen Z. Impressed

 

Wicked! This is the exact game I wanted to play!

 

Hmm, why not just transfer your paypal cash to your bank account, then order with credit card?

 

SonyStyle in the US told me the same thing. Sounds like some reps were doing the deep discounts, but Sony killed it off.

I was only able to get 5% and free expedited shipping, but that was done because of the of delays in shipment.

 

What are guys thoughts on the Z, after owning it for sometime? What are your impressions now after the dust has settled?

 

Have had it for three days. Absolutely love it. Love it love it love it. It's perfect for me.

 

what do you guys think of raid 0 reliability? is it something to be concerned about? do we have to make backups every week?

what do you guys think the failure rate of a drive in this configuration is?

Do you think in couple of years you would be able to swap the quad raid for a single SSD(newer, thinner than current single SSD's)?

 

Raid0 or no Raid 0. I am a big fan of daily backups. Just schedule your backup program to run daily. There's no advantage to waiting 1 whole week.

 

What are you using for your backup program?

 

The beauty of new Z is that with RAID0 you won't even notice backup running in background (although it's better to have backup run when computer is not actively used).

 

I prefer Norton Ghost 15. Works like a champ.

 

Removed/Deleted

 

Hi!
Finally made an order through US Sonystyle. Could get a 15% discount on absolutely basic model but in Carbon Fiber (i5-540, 4gb, 128 gb SSD). Had to purchase 3 year extended warranty and a docking station in order to get a discount. Think made a good deal. Estimated shipping date: 05/04/10.

 

The notebookcheck review has finally been released but they only tested on the 1600x900 screen. I still want to see test on the 1080P screen.
http://www.notebookcheck.com/Test-Sony-Vaio-VPCZ11X9E-B-Notebook.28202.0.html

 

I've had a lot of trouble getting the trackpad to operate smoothly (particularly w/ multi-touch and one- or two-finger scrolling). Not sure if I simply need to reinstall the drivers, but it's not nearly as smooth as my old (pre-unibody) MBP. Any input on your experiences would be appreciated.

 

Is there an English version available?

 

You can get a translation using Google Translate.

http://translate.google.com/transla...t-Sony-Vaio-VPCZ11X9E-B-Notebook.28202.0.html

 

Thanks!!!!

 

Every week? I wouldn't do backups that rarely even with RAID 1. What if a file gets deleted, or Word decides to overwrite your document with garbage?

Get a NAS unless you have a server, and set up nightly backups using a backup program that doesn't require manual intervention, and that doesn't ruin the entire backup set if the network goes down while it's backing up.

 

Swtching from the Macbook trackpad gave me some time to get used to it. While the Macbook two finger gesture works out of the box the vaio pad seems to be a little more picky. I have best results when putting less pressure on the pad and doing the gesture a little bit slower with less drive. Two finger zooming works just as good. Very useful on the full hd screen quickly improving the readability of small text passages.

 

Hey ZoinksS2k and anyone that have problems with the graphics card driver crashing,

Is your graphics card driver still crashing randomly while watching videos on the web? Recently I did a complete system restore and started using Google Chrome as my default internet browser. Clicking the full-screen button on a youtube video gives my VAIO Z VPCZ117 a small chance of going black and unresponsive. No keyboard response, as Alt-F4, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-tab, Esc doesn’t work. Caps Lock no longer triggers the Caps Lock LED indicator. The only button that does anything is holding the power button and giving the laptop a cold shutdown.

I have since been able to reproduce this problem three more times on different videos by playing youtube videos while switching from full-screen to normal repeatedly, 1 time with flash 10 and two times with flash 10.1. All three times were on Goolge Chrome. The time it takes for this test to crash my VAIO is really random. It has ranged from 5 min to almost 50.
Before the complete system restore, Firefox was my main internet browser, and I don’t remember getting these crashes. I am going to try to reproduce these crashes in Firefox, if I am not able to we will at least know it is a Google Chrome exclusive bug and just stop using it.

I would really appreciate it if someone can shed some light as to how I can stop getting these crashes, and if they do happen how I can recover from them without a cold reboot to my laptop. As you can imagine I am rather unhappy with paying $19,980 HKD for this laptop and I can’t even watch YouTube videos without fear of it randomly crashing. Please give me a reply if you are experience a similar problem.

Spec:
VPCZ117GG
CPU: Intel i7-620M
RAM: 8GB
SSD: 256GB – 4x128

PS. All these crashes have occurred while my laptop was connected to an external monitor at 1920x1080 resolutions through HDMI in Projector Only mode. I will try to reproduce this bug without the monitor since it is very likely that Sony was sloppy with the Nvidia drivers in dealing with external monitors.

 

Can you have multiple schedules with Norton Ghost pointing to different drives at different times and specifying different areas and methods of backup?

 

I'm very satisfied in using (since 2 years ago) Syncback with a lot of features, more benefits getting paid edition.

 

I've had mine for 10 days now and I can hardly wait for the redesign 2 yrs. from now. :laugh:

 

windows 7 has a backup and restore utility built-in. it's simple, but gets the job done for most people.

alternatively, get a windows home server! seamless, complete backup of every computer, every day.

 

Looks like nvidia driver needs a decent stable update, one that eliminates the dpc latency interrupts.

 

Hey can someone settle this one and more all. will my ssd drives slow down my computer performence over time because it doesn't support trim........sorry I never felt like this have been settled....of course and it is an massive thread. What would be the point of this amazing computer if it sucks after only a year or two of using it right? This would be a make it or break it descion. And if the Trim is no supported is there another way to get your write speed back up?

If you could PM that would be cool.......but I'm new to the forum and I'm not sure if I have PMing enabled.

 

I haven't had a crash recently. I've done a clean install since then, so maybe some of the Sony media apps and libraries are the problem.

I'm always happy to get new video drivers, especially with Nvidia. They generally increase performance with each release, or burn out your GPU

Yes. There are two main methods, full and incremental. It uses a VSS-type backup. I think it also does a file-based archive for your My Documents dir, but I haven't used it.

It is not settled, but I'm in the camp that is saying it isn't an immediate problem. There is some garbage collection happening which restores write performance.

I currently consider this a non-issue since some people have posted that they executed a SECURE_DELETE on the drives. I haven't confirmed this yet, but this command completely normalizes the drive.

 

Hope it's not off-topic, but it's interesting to compare the new Z with the new MBP http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html