VAIO TZ Owner's Thread

One question guys...

The plastic border around the screen is a little diffent from each side....On the left side is ok, but on the right side the border is a little bit loose. When you press it gently with your fingers it goes down a little and makes a small squiking noise.
Any else notice this??

 

Yup. People have speculated that it's because that's where the ONESeg antenna is for the Japan edition. No antenna = empty space inside. A poor design if you ask me.

 

I'm a soon to be owner of a tz but have some quick questions. I been researching for weeks now and debating between the tz and sz. My questions concern the tz though, my research has come to conclude that the tz on vista is quite slow without the ssd and installing xp could only save it from me throwing it across the room .

1 - How significant is the speed increase from vista to xp
2 - I also want to know how long is the boot up on vista and xp
3 - By installing xp on the tz is there any problems that I may encounter

Thanks guys in advance

 

1. It's significantly faster, probably 10-15% if I was pressed to give you a metric.

2. I don't know what the boot-up is on XP because I have yet to downgrade, will do that on my next TZ, but it takes 1 minute and 15 seconds to boot up my current Vista TZ.

3. I suggest you buy the downgrade disks from Portable One, that's what I did, and make sure to save the Battery Care and WinDVD installers and you'll be all set. You could, of course, follow the manual XP downgrade route, but that's certain to introduce many more problems, primarily from missed or poorly understood steps during the install process.

Hope that helps, but you should know that the SSD-based TZ is as fast as the best-equipped SZ and the TZ's screen is far better.

 

yah im really on the wall on the sz and tz but I really love the look of the tz and feel im going to regret it if i purchase the sz. The only thing holding me back is performance gap between the 2. What I plan to do is run xp on the tz for now until the price of ssd goes down then I will upgrade to vista, sounds like a good plan?

Can the TZ take ddr2 800 ram (pc 6400)?

Oh one last question my desktop is a P4 3.0 ht with 1 gb ram pc2100 and a radeon 9600 258 mb, I know the system is ancient but it runs xp like champ but probably would get slaughtered by vista. I want to know how the tz without ssd in xp or vista would stack up to my desktop.

 

I am currently using an SZ670N but I had a TZ190N for about 2 months -- sold it because I need more room than the 32G SSD allows. I REALLY liked the TZ! It has about the best color saturation and clarity of any screen I've seen, and that includes several ultra mobile pc's as well as the SZ I have now. The SZ display is good but doesn't quite match the TZ IMHO (and I had them side by side to compare). The SSD in the TZ is definitely faster, lighter and cooler -- that's why I'd really like to get a TZ198 with the 64G SSD but they're hard to find right now unless you're able to spend $4k + sales tax to buy it from Sony. I can't answer your questions about the ram but I believe the TZ Ram is pretty limited in terms of what can be used. The TZ has really good battery life too -- more than twice what I get with my SZ.

I debated between the TZ and SZ like you are and only opted for the SZ after I concluded my TZ with 32G SSD was not enough storage space. But I'll probably end up getting a TZ198 when I can find one affordable.

 

Forgot to add that I used Vista on my TZ and even with its limited SSD space, once I'd removed all the bloatware and tweaked it per the suggestions in another thread in the OS forum here, I found Vista quite usable (remember, I had 2G RAM -- I believe that's essential). It was responsive and "fast" -- probably not as fast as XP would have been because of the higher overhead in Vista but it was fast enough for my needs.

 

What's so special about WinDVD? It was one of the first bits of bloatware I uninstalled. The most important thing you have to do first though is remove Norton, disable Defender, switch to Firefox and learn to recognize spyware and viruses when you see them, not leave it up to your system. Not too hard really.

TT

 

RAM Upgrade - Check this:

I just looked at the 1gb ram of my new TZ150 and it came out to be PC2-5300 (667 Mhz)!!!! All the spec sheets as well the sony website state that ram speed is PC2-4200 (533 Mhz) and equal to front side bus speed, which made sense. But what's up with the 667 Mhz RAM from Qimonda??? For those of you thinking to upgrade to 2GB, this is the original 1GB that it comes with:

HYS64T128021HDL-3S-B : Google this and find on Qimonda website...

Now, I'm still going to upgrade to 2 GB (costs about $60), but have the following questions:

1) Did anyone check their RAM and confirms the PC2-5300 667Mhz module?

2) For those of you already owning a 2GB RAM TZ model, what kind do you have?

3) If so, should I go with buying a 2GB 667Mhz module or stick with the production specs of 2GB 533 Mhz?

4) I believe a 667 Mhz RAM would not harm my system, it would just not work at its full speed -am I correct?

I am quite confused at this point and would appreciate any help. If you did check your RAMs (esp 2GB), could you please reply with the full model number printed on RAM sticker?

Many Thanks!

 

I am considering buying 2GB too since prices are very low nowadays

I was buying 2x1GB to my SZ, which has 533MHz bus too. I bought 667MHz because of the lower price (compared to 533) and everything worked perfectly. VAIO set their speed to 533 and thats it..

So don't be afraid of buying the faster one, BIOS (or something that checks HW capability) will do the ram working.. It is known that if you buy faster RAM then MoBo can handle, it runs at max speed suppoerted by your MoBo..

 

Yes but 667Mhz rams have a cas latency of cl5 while 533Mhz are cl4. The lower the cl the better, and my system will do 533 in either case, so why not go with the 533? Somebody said that because the 667 wont run at its max speed, the temperature will be cooler on that compared to 533 at full capacity... Any ideas?

 

My TZ is still on its way. But I already bought 2GB 667Mhz RAM from newegg since I read several review which said it come with PC2 5300 RAM. I think you might mistake the FSB (which is 533Mhz) with RAM clock. Intel system runs on DDR2 divider ratio so memory is not necessary to have same clock as FSB.

Since I don't have TZ on hand yet, I can't guarantee it have 667Mhz RAM. But almost all 667Mhz CAS5 memory can run 533Mhz with CAS4, you just need to adjust it in Bios. However, CAS4 or CAS5 won't make a difference on these TZ since the performance will be bottlenecked by the CPU before latency difference matters.

 

Well I wipe my harddrive and forgot to back up the vaio recovery folder, can someone be kind enough to send me theres C:windows/sonysys/vaiorecovery

 

Hi

Could I get a little help please?

My TZ 25L [Korean celeron M model] has a directory labeled 'drivers' which, believe it or not, contains all the drivers to run the laptop.

When I change from Korean to English OS, do you think I should use those Korean drivers, or download American ones?

I realise you can't say for sure, but your opinion would be very welcome indeed!

Please please let me know what you think, it'll really help. Thanks!!

 

I read this in a review of the TZ:

"Some clarification on a point that's been brought up repeatedly:
No Santa Rosa. It won't be missed much on a laptop like this, and the chipset itself draws more power as far as I know.
The improvement on CPU power management brought about by Santa Rosa will see few benefits with the ultra low voltage processor.
Since I usually use my laptop plugged in, I wouldn't mind sacrificing some battery life for the improved integrated graphics that come with the new chipset, but I don't really need the power.
All in all I'd say Napa is still the way to go with slim spec ultraportables like these".

http://whispertotherain.blogspot.com/2007/08/sony-tz-vgn-tzvnx-review.html

My question is: Is really so bad the Santa Rosa chipset? Will not benefite the TZ from it?

 

bump bump bump!

 

Just want to tell you all that now I have received the TZ from Conics, sent to Norway. Great customer service from that net shop. I've got a white model TZ91, with 64GB SSD and DVD, 7600 processor and 2GB RAM, Vista Home Premium. The machine is just a beauty! I will complete the storage with an ExpressCard from Transcend 32GB, a Memory Stick 8GB and a micro SD (in an regular SD adapter) 8GB. That should be enough for my needs.

BTW, English keyboard, a very good one! The US version, and I prefer it to the UK version.

As I am very busy this week, I cannot make it ready and try it before the weekend. I have not yet had the time to check what software that comes with the machine, but I vaguely remember that there were about 57GB left on the SSD, so there cannot be much more than the OS?

I will share my experience with this beauty as soon as I have got the time to play around with it.

 

I used the Transcend 32G express card on my TZ190 -- awesome! But keep in mind that the memory card slots ALL operate at USB data rate speeds, not nearly as fast as the SSD or internal HDD. I mention this to caution which software, if any, you run from the memory cards -- it will be slower working with the SSD, and avoid applications that need to go from memory card to memory card -- that's even slower yet.

 

Thanks for the experienced advice. I think I will try and use the ExpressCard only as a storage disc, for documents and pictures.

 

Oh, white color, nice mandersen! Can we see pictures of it?

 

Can i use the tz to play old games like warcraft3? i wanted to use it as a seond gaming option other than my desktop so that I can play games while I am travelling (overseas.)

 

I know it's not as small, but you will be much better off using a SZ for that.

 

Hello all

I spent four days reading this thread before posting, so hopefully a n00bie post wont annoy you all.

I'm from the UK and have th TZ21MN/N model. No built in 3G wifi, but we have loads of free wi-fi hotspots in Manchester UK so not an issue, and no fingerprint reader.

Specs 100GB HDD / DVD / dual core 1.06Ghz blah blah.

Things I'd like to share.

Vista Business, as I am a business user and do a lot ot traveling and presentations, this thing is FAB, I don't need awesome power to do powerpoint presentations excell spreadsheets etc so it fills the bill, But.. is can be sometimes... rather slow.

Being a techy, of course I replaced the OS to XP and WOW, even better performance, but i missed the "sony" look and feel that vista has on it (Minus the bloatware of course).

I have two questions to ask other TZ owners..

Does the expresscard SSD improve performance with vista speed boost?

Has any one else have issues with the touch pad? Black on a black keyboard.. can cause issues when traveling at night (which is what I do most of the time)

Cheers. and thanks for some interesting reading.

Carlos

 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dockhead
Back to the original theme: This guy Ivan at some company called Portable One (lapstopinc.com) has posted that he will soon have adapators to put a HD in place of the optical drive in the TZ:

http://www.leog.net/fujp_forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=12095

Thanks to rahunirmal for putting up the link. I have written to Ivan to ask whether he will be selling them separately and for how much.

I have recently been in communication with Ivan Gospich @ Portable One (lapstopinc.com) to find out the status on this swap kit...Q & A listed below:

WHIZKIDD: I am enquiring to purchase a 2.5 hard drive kit for a sony viao vgn-tz195n/xc. Do you stock this kit? If so, what are the options available?

IVAN: Only if you purchased machine from us, we apologize but there are no exceptions unfortunately.

WHIZKIDD: I am based in the United Kingdom and unfortunately this item was a birthday present from my brother who live in the States and don’t know whether you are the supplier or not. You are very highly recommended to me by many vaio forum users and were confident you could supply the required kit. I am desperately trying to avoid an external hard drive option and I will be extremely grateful If you would make an exception on this occasion and will promise to purchase from you in the future.

IVAN: Unfortuinately we cannot Sony’s rules; sorry and happy birthday.

WHIZKIDD: What info do you need to find out if it was purchased from you or not....I don’t really want to interrogate my brother for this and I don’t want him to think I’m not happy with it.

IVAN: Unfortunately we cannot, Sony was extremely adamant towards this and told us no exceptions for our corporate customers only and we are not going to risk our business for it. Any issues have to be handled by us not them; we have to submit each serial number, service tag number and product code off the bottom of each unit we offer with such too.

WHIZKIDD: I can supply you will all the relevant serial, service tag and product code from this unit. The item is supplied Sony USA model.

IVAN: Yes but if it does not match one of the systems they shipped us they will refuse to let us do it; my apologies.

WHIZKIDD: OK, no problem....It’s just a matter of time before this kit will become widely available. If you come across a retailer/supplier who stocks this kit, I will appreciate it if you could forward me their details.
Thank you very much for your time....It’s unfortunate we couldn’t do some business.

WHIZKIDD: Just satisfy my curiosity, can you list me the components in the kit?

IVAN: I have no clue; our Sony service center has to file a bunch of paperwork for each set; it consists of around 10 core parts I am told.

I personally do not believe Ivan can provide these kits...Simply because if sony were to provide this option to authorised reseller, it would be widely available everywhere.

 

I have a TZ91S shipping from SonyStyle Japan right now, and I'm a bit nervous because of more than a few unlucky experiences with dead/stuck/hot pixels. I earlier purchased (and later returned) a UX-92S, which, despite an otherwise *gorgeous* screen, had a *real* nice hot pixel right in the middle of it.

After reading through this whole thread for posts about the problem, I found very few complaints. May I take this to mean that everyone is delighted with their messed-up-pixel-free displays? How many people here have unresponsive pixels on their TZs?

For ~350000yen, I'd expect the frequency of unresponsive pixels to be nice and low, but my luck in this department is poor.

Thanks everyone.

 

Hi aagrajag

also got one stuck pixel right in the middle of the screen on my brand new all-inclusive TZ91-64SSD.
Had to send it back to PJ 2 weeks ago.
Eventhough it still comes cheap compared to Sony's European prices (this specific model is even not available here), it is unbelievable quality control let that kind of detail go.

 

Hi joelafrite

Thanks for the heads-up, but now I'm even *more* nervous. I didn't order through any intermediary, but directly off the japanese sonystyle website. It's being sent to my address here in Japan. Parsing through Sony's pixel policy, they will not accept an exchange on that basis. I only managed to return the UX because the Vaio representative in the brick'n'mortar in Hiroshima mistakenly told me that messed-up pixels were covered under the warranty. No such luck this time.

You mentioned that you had to send your first TZ back to PriceJapan. It that actually possible with PJ for a bad pixel? I nipped over to their site, parsed through their warranty/return info, and only found a lot of "all sales are final" stuff; nothing about dead pixels, except with regard to projectors. I PJ really does allow returns on bad pixels, I may just cancel the direct order and place it through them.

 

Regarding TZ195N/XC ready boost and performance, adding a USB stick won't be noticeable, maybe 3 to 4 seconds max. Remember that it has a Samsung 48GB SSD disk that is much faster (60 to 100MB/s) than your typical USB stick (5 to 10MB/s).
The biggest problem is the Vista footprint and the bloatware which drag down performance. My "virgin" TZ195 had 14GB free out of the 48GB; even after removing the bloatware (wasting 4 hours, gotta do it very carefully) I got only 18GB free. So I ordered the "downgrade" to Win XP, ridiculous at it might sound.

If you insist on using ready-boost, you need to buy the fastest USB memory stick you can find; the "run-of-the-mill" won't do.

 

Jabarsa, can you give me a list of the programs you removed. After 3 hours playing with it, I only got 15.3G free. Did you keep the MS travel and map program?

What virus/firewall software do you guys use for your TZs. please suggest. thanks

 

If you make recovery discs and get rid of the hidden partition, you should get about 10GB of extra space...

 

Looks like PJ deals with those on a "per case" basis. I sent them a photo of the display, then they told me to ship the laptop back. Perhaps they don't even know whether they can get it replaced.

I will keep you updated as soon as I grab some info from them (sent it back 2 weeks ago. Since then, the only feedback I got was through Japan Post last week : at least the laptop was delivered to them !)

 

I actually made it through all pages on this thread, whoo hoo!!!

I bought the 150 a few months ago from BestBuy. In retrospect, I guess I should have done more research. The form factor of the box is just fantastic, what a beautiful beast! But as with others, the bloatware and speed issues got me down. I created recovery disks and stuck in Vista Ultimate, repartitioned and installed anew. It was still slow.

I turned off some key Vista features - like the Sidebar, Indexing and Aero - and that made all the difference in the world. It's more tolerable now in terms of speed, but it's still not a desktop replacement.

• Things I love - size, weight, screen, wow-factor and the battery life
• Things I hate - speed, black-on-black keyboard (makes it difficult in the dark to type, bloatware (WTF?!), harddisk space

So here's my question to the crowd: Should I look at selling this on something like Craigslist (and by the way, what's a reasonable price I can sell it for?) and getting one of the 19x with SSD and 2GB RAM?

Ultimately, here's what I want to do with the TZ:

• Multitasking (up to 8 programs open at the same time)
• Screen recordings (like Captivate and Camtasia, etc.)
• Light graphic/video editing (Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, etc.)
• Some programming (Visual Studio .NET, etc.)
• Run Office 2007, Adobe Acrobat Professional, etc.
• Watch movies
• Be a desktop replacement (BTW, can anyone comment on good external monitor or 2x monitor configurations with the docking station?)
• Roadwarrior (cars and planes) stuff (BTW, can anyone comment on protective options like leather case, etc.?)

Looks like the 198 is out of commission now, too bad as that is the one I would have liked to get. I guess I'm hestitant to upgrade the RAM to 2GB as that seems more like a band-aid fix than starting out with the right box to begin with.

Any advice would be welcome on what the reality is of using this as a desktop replacement, experiences, etc.

 

2gb of ram makes all the difference and you can always add a ssd drive to your current machine if you want.

 

hmm...where/how to I get an SSD drive? has anyone done this before and is there a recommended drive that is known to work well?

the ram, is this something i can order online? any recommendations?

 

Adding a SSD drive that will result in a significant difference in performance will be costly and difficult. I don't recommend it. The extra GB of RAM supposedly makes a big difference though. It's worth trying since you can get 2 GB sticks for around $50-$100.

 

samsung makes a 32gb ssd drive for about $400

 

By all means, go for the upgrade in RAM -- Vista on these machines with only 1GB of RAM is always going to be slow. Since the machine has a number of memory card slots, I also suggest you get a high quality SDHC memory card and turn on ReadyBoost in Vista. I believe that adds some responsiveness -- worked in my earlier TZ190 and my SZ670 as well. Hard to tell how much it helps with my TZ198 since I have the large (65G) SSD. But, all said and done, the 4500rpm HDD will always be a factor in slow-running Vista installations -- I concur with the recommendation to add an SSD, if you can afford to do so.

Incidentally, the slow-running Vista frustration is common to a lot of different laptops these days -- you could consider downgrading to WinXP.

 

I am very seriously considering buying a TZ 170 (standard hard drive, 2 GB RAM, Vista). The screen is great and the light weight is very appealing to me. I will NOT be using this machine as a desktop replacement or as a gaming machine. It will typically be used for word processing, web browsing, email, and PowerPoint presentations. One concern that has been repeatedly expressed in this forum concerns processing speed. What I would like to find out is whether the limitations in processing speed that I have been reading about are relevant for the kind of non-demanding tasks that intend to use the machine for, or whether they apply just to high-demand tasks like gaming.

 

For your uses, the TZ's performance will be more than adequate. The only thing I would do is remove the bloatware from the system (The TZs have a TON that really slow/cripple the system down, almost unusable with 1gb) or downgrade to XP.

Vista is a resource-hog, especially with all of Sony's bloatware, installing a clean install of Vista or XP would really help.

 

Yeah you'll be fine, after installing all my apps my clean vista install boots up in 55 secs on my tz130 or so vs the 3 mins with the bloatcrap.;

 

Cool, looks like the recommendations are on the RAM side of the business. I guess that would save me from plunking down $3+k. Any recommendations on RAM from an online vendor that is known to work?

 

You are buying the TZ170 correct? That has 2gb of ram, thats the maximum the TZ can take. So your fine on the ram front, those with 1gb of ram are strongly advised to upgrade to 2gb.

 

no, i've got the 150. i've read some threads here about different speeds, still don't know what i should be looking for when i go to buy the 2 GB stick.

 

voipben,
I removed all the trialware(quickbooks, norton, office2007), all Sony's [click to dvd, location free player, sonic stage, spiderman wallpaper, vaio survey, sony games],Microsoft Works, MS TravelMap, all Corels (paintshop, etc), all the AOL's.

To remove,
1)use the add/remove from the control panel, and then
2)use windows explorer to go to program files folder and delete what was left. Then
3)use a free utility like cc cleaner to remove the "crap" left in the registry, and then
4)defragment the ssd disk.

I use AVG free anti-virus and Comodo firewall (ZoneAlarm got bloated and bombards you with ads, the wi-fi connection is erratic, and the hibernation does not work with it). I will add PCTools Spyware Doctor (which I also use on my 10" Vaio T150) in place of the inferior Windows Defender .

Currently I have 17GB free, by removing all the checkpointed restore backups except for the last good one. I WOULD NOT REMOVE THE HIDDEN PARTITION! (Remember Murphy's Law!).

The only major software I have on the TZ195 is Office 2003 without Access or Publisher or Outlook.

I also use a 2GB memory stick for watching movies on the airplane and storing work files; I am looking for a 4 or 8GB reasonably priced stick or SD card that has around 20MB/s speed (what in flash memory trade they label 155X speed).

The Vaio version of the Intervideo DVD player is emasculated; it cannot play the H264 formats used on the iPhone, pain in the ...I will need to decide if I will use Apple's QT 7.0 or buy the Intervideo upgrade or..

TZ195 Timing:
Cold start to log on: 43 sec
Shutdown: 43 sec
Go to hibernation: 3 to 7 sec
Resume from hibernation: 29 sec
S/D and re-start to log on: 1min13sec

I have 22 items that autostart; I will prune the list down (remove adobe startups, smartWi helper, vista vaio survey, bluetooth,)...I'll let you guys know when I'm successful...or when I give up and upgrade to Win XP.

 

The best performance improvment will come from having 2GB of RAM. Next, is using a reasonably fast flash memory, e.g. SD or memory stick with 2 to 4GB to store your data files, music, movies, etc.

The TZ series is not designed as a desktop replacement, so don't get your hopes up..it is a road-warrior machine, light weight, with the essentials to stay connected, do light work, entertainment (play movies or music, not edit or creat movies), and easy to use.

 

Hi all
I've been waiting patiently for sonystyle japan to give some sort of offer on the tz91, cuz I'm a poor student, but love the Tz
now I found a good offer on the Tz71B (don't know the overseas name) its about 175000yen (1550USD) this would give me core2duo 1GH, 1GB ram, dvdRw, but the 80GB @4200rpm HDD (which I understand sucks)
With that same money I could buy a Tz91, core2duo 1.2GH, 1GB ram, NO dvdrw, and the 160GB HDD @5400rpm

I know It all depends on what I need the laptop for (which would not be gaming nor video editing) but

Can you give me your opinion on what is more desirable?, for those of you that have had the pleasure of experiencing both
Also for those of you that have had trouble with the 4200rpm how badly would you change it for a 5400rpm one?, either xp downgraded or not
Or for those who don't have a OD how badly do you miss it/hate having to lug an external one around?

and finally which would you get if you were in my situation
Thanks in advance for your replies
You know sometimes we just need a little push to be able to jump in the water!

 

The TZ certainly looks like a great option. I'm still deciding on what notebook to buy and this is one in my final four, and currently at the top of my list.

But I do have a question.

* I will use this for photoshop etc while in the field (one reason I need a light laptop), and although I guess it will work well in photoshop, though a tad slow, I am concerned how it will work with Lightroom. Because I shoot RAW, I need something like lightroom to work with the files, and on my desktop PC, a 2year old 2.2gig dual athlon, it already is a bit sluggish. Has anyone tried Lightroom on the TZ? Does the thumbnails take too long to display? Does it take too long to bring the full sharp picture up? (I would have the 2gig RAM version)

 

MCDr, do you live in Japan ?. Out of those two model I'd prefer the one with the dvd burner. Make sure you upgrade it to 2gb of memory.

ovbg, the tz will def be slower than your 2 year old dual athlon, but I think it should be manageable to use.

 

Im uninstalling some programs but not gaining any space.. Im actually losing space on my disk... I remember I once read what that problem was but cant remember.. any suggestions?

 

The TZ can feel as fast as your Athlon, if you choose the SSD drive.

Turn off Hibernation.