VAIO TZ Owner's Thread

quoting myself here

even the sony rep doesn't seem to know completely about the dead pixel policy but he said i can have a general return policy of a straight swap or repair within first 14 days if i'm not happy. this may cover any dead/stuck pixels. i am unsure how well this would work in theory but i guess its pretty rare for TZ to have any such issues anyway from what i've come across.

...
the TZ i'm thinking of purchasing falls under current recall but they are already getting this fixed at repair centre so i wouldn't need to worry about it.

 

well. after TZ service was done by Sony's rep my TZ looks like this:
http://picasaweb.google.com/maximidi/Desktop#
called Sony and hopefully they will send me the right part for the replacement.
When i pointed to scratched screw covers to rep he said that he did everything according to the manual...

 

Thats unacceptable. I baby my TZ and if I get it back anything short of perfect, i'm going to *****. Thanks for the pics. I have my repair scheduled for next week.

 

I have a Sony TZ, and I have been able to receive WiFi in most places outside the US. Now I am away on biz to Europe, and the last 3 hotels I went to did NOT have WiFi, only an ethernet cable connected to a router in each room. I CAN NOT get the TZ to see the internet connection. I have tried for hours!!!!! What am I doing wrong?? Is there a certain setting I should be using??? I have never been able to receive the internet via cable, even at home. I urgently need to send info to office, any suggestions??

 

make sure the onboard nic isnt disabled as a power save feature. I think you can check Vaio Status to see this. Otherwise it should work no problem.

 

I just had my TZ service done and it was not completed(due to other circumstances). the first problem which occurred was that the tech couldn't get the screw covers out easily. He called the "depot". they told him it was okay to scratch the screw covers and they would supply new ones.
I am totally disgusted at this point with this supposed repair..

..I'm plain ol' fizzled out

 

Man , what a bunch of idiots sony hired to rework the TZ . I have never opened up my TZ before today & was easily able to remove the screw covers without leaving as much as a speck or mark on any of them .

The trick is you must use a safety pin & be very careful.

 

Good Tip. Too Bad most techs would scoff at that suggestion and take out an electric drill. J/K, kinda.

 

Service completed. The guy was very professional and did an excellent job. I have no marks on any covers and he even did a camera replacement which he said was part of the service. I am now ready to put my TZ on ebay, as I am a happy Z owner now.

 

In my TZ I checked the task manager and I have running around 88 processes. I know that they are way too much...what can I do except of a clean install?

 

Glad to hear! You might want to make a note of your experience over in the main TZ Recall thread, so that others know for future reference. Think you're only the 3rd person with a good on-site experience so far.

Best thing to do is follow the suggestions found at Les' Vista Tweaks & Tips thread. Eliminating some autostart programs and disabling a few unnecessary services will probably help. I'm at around 70 processes now, after some minor tweaking.

 

shipping kit boxes arrived today
TZ 191 on its way to its destiny at SD Depot
Hopefully this will have an equitable outcome
I know nothing was wrong with this computer before all this "touching" happened

 

I just got my new TZ!
clean installed vista and finally installed all the drivers.
I'm wondering, what sort of CPU temps are everyone getting from their TZ, mine is running at 56C idle... which seems to be quite hot compared to my old pentium M while idled at around 45C
Im using RMclock to check the CPU temp.

 

I'd flip if my TZ is like this.

I'd rather it overheat than seeing a POS like that. TZ is all about its style and look

 

Got an email from Sony today.

My TZ21 is affected. They have promised a three day turn around though.

Gutted

 

Update: I got replacement caps and all is good and new now!

 

my tz92NS was affected too but Sony really have done a good job on this one. Even though I live in Switzerland and ordered the tz from Japan they still serviced it free of charge. In addition they even put a 4gb microvault usb stick into the parcel and apologised for all the trouble they caused (that's freaking polite) and on top of that they even cleaned my keyboard. Sony definitely have improved in terms of Service and Customer Care

 

Hello Alfa,

you mentioned the following message :
I have a VAIO TZ Series - VGN-TZ27GN with an Intel U7600(1.20 GHz). This is a Hong Kong Model. It originally came with a 1GB DDR2 SDRAM but i upgraded it into a 2 gig RAM. The RAM they gave me is a single 2 gig stick specs as;

Transcend JetRAM DDR2 667 model JM667QSU-2G.

It now runs perfectly on the TZ. A little Caveat. Initially the TZ was doing a blue screen and i thought i had a bad or incompatible RAM. The problem went away after i the stepped the memory speed to 533Mhz from Vista's default 400Mhz memory speed.
================
thanks to this posting, i could recently upgrade mine to 2GB. however i could not step up memory speed to 533Mhz. How is it possible to do this ? Can you please explain to me step by step ? Thanks. sitting in moscow, russia, it is pretty tough to find exactly what one wants !!!

 

My TZ was injured too - Sony SD called on thursday, on monday the shipping box came. I packed the TZ on tuesday and ordered pick up on wednesday. (from Czech Republic to France via DHL Express).

On Friday(!!) DHL courier was standing in front of my house with box in his hands. Yes, my TZ is back after hardly 1 day at SD. It came like new, with apologies 2GB USB stick and polishing fabric.

Sony is great (nowadays)

 

Vaio is back. I chased Vaio support for what was done. Got the following reply

This is the list of parts which were changed on Your laptop:
Measure for DC harness
Add GND Cable
Sheet hinge
DC jack replacement check
Measure for screw
Measure for LCD harness
Camera

Any parts changed in rework centre are covered by 6 months warranty, warranty only for these specific parts not for full laptop.

So no extended warranty! hmmm....not nice that.. not nice at all

 

Has anyone tested this with the SR series? I want to run a virtual x64 Vista Ultimate but cannot do it because VT is not enabled.

Thanks

 

At least you had a good experience! I sent mine in, got no response from Sony India for many days. Finally had to email the Sony India CEO to get them to respond. Ultimately, got my machine back. Don't know what they changed, and no, certainly no USB stick!

 

Anyone know how to remove the TZ keyboard once all screws are removed?

 

Can I remove old 1.8 hdd and put a new Toshiba 1.8-Inch SATA HDD 250 ? I don`t know differences between zif and sata. May I use 1.8 inch sata hdd?

 

Im buying a VAIO TZ and needed to know exactely what hard drive interface it uses. Is it PATA with ZIF (flexibe) connector? I have a 64GB PATA Samsung Solid State Drive with a ZIF connector (its a 1.8" model but since its smaller it will fit) and wanted to try it on the TZ.

Thanks in advance for the input!

 

It's PATA ZIF, you will need this :

Samsung ZIF MCCOE64GQMPQ-M1A

 

Hello everyone, this is my first post.

I just got a VAIO TZ from a friend , and some keyboard keys are missing ( almost all the F keys,tab and left right arrows) and the frame is broken where the screws on the hinges are. what I did is JB welded the monitor frame so i could work on it (estimated repair cost was given to me $900). it got overheated and melted the lower left frame a bit and a small area of the battery.

thing is, I went to SONY (Kuwait) today , and the tech guy there told me that he could not accept the recall because the laptop is sort of damaged. I read SONY's support page for the TZ recall but it says nothing about that. the tz is at the shop now to see if the keyboard could be replaced with the frame JB welded. I tried googling recall rules/guide but im not sure about what the tech guy told me. any help would be highly appreciated.

 

Searched for this problem and dint find any posts. So here it goes.

I have a vaio TZ270N which came with vista oem pre-installed on a single 120GB. Now i know the hidden partition takes up around 8-10 gb so it was showing 110 gb if i remember correctly. like all, i wiped the hdd clean and installed xp after completely formatting and partitioning the disk. had driver problems and re-installed xp a 2nd and 3rd time. realized that i had an XP recovery disk (OEM) that came wit the laptop

. so i installed that. here it gave me no options to make partitions and installed on a single partition (the entire hard disk) so now that all my drivers/utils were working i decided to do a non-destructive partition with Gparted Live (bootable) CD and it showed me 111.78gb and i partitioned it. Now I have the system partition at 29.29gb and a second primary partition at 82.49gb a total of 111.78gb. Now I suddenly realized that there is that 8.22gb missing. So i figured it was that hidden vista recovery partition. So i tried to look for it to possibly save that partition on a bootable dvds or just delete it.

The problem is that It doesnt show up with any partition tool. So far i tried looking for its existence with Gparted, Cute Partition Manager, EASEUS partition manager, Driveimage XML, diskpart and Partition Logic. I JUST CANT SEE IT!!?? Its supposed to have 120gb and it doesnt show a hidden partition of exactly 8.3 gb. Are there any other partition tools you think i should try?

Does this make any sense to anyone? I wonder if it will show up if i recover the original vista oem back on to the hard drive. but i dont have the disk.

Please help if you know what i should do.

thank you

Wits End.

 

Hard drive manufacturers calculate hard disk size in 'base 10' notation while Windows does the calculation in 'base 2' (binary) format. Both the manufacturer and Windows are giving you the "correct" number.

1 Gigabyte as defined by a manufacturer is 1,000,000,000,000 Bytes. This makes sense in the metric base 10 sense as we define kilo as 1000, mega as 1,000,000 and giga as 1,000,000,000,000.

Windows, however, calculates the disk size in a base 2 system. Base 2 does not convert into base 10 exactly in most cases but back in the day it was close enough so that a kilobyte was defined as 2^10 or 1024.

2^10 is 1024 is 1 kilobyte
2^20 is 1048576 or 1 megabyte
2^30 is 1073741824 or 1 gigabyte

When the hard disk manufacturer sold you a 120 Gig hard drive, they were selling you 120,000,000,000 bytes. Windows divides this number by what it considers a GB (1073741824) and reports the hard disk size as:

120000000000 (bytes) / 1073741824 (bytes per GB) = 111.8 GB

This accounts for the 'missing' 8.2 GB in the hard disk's size. You still have 120,000,000,000 bytes to use but because of inconsistent definitions of what kilo, mega and giga really represent, there is an inconsistency in the measurement of size.

 

Hi,

I'm currently looking into the possibility of me self-installing an internal WWAN module on my VGN-TZ17GN. (Singapore set)

I'm currently using the Bandluxe C100S HSDPA (Expresscard) modem.

Was looking into the available embedded modules and found 2 popular ones.

Sierra Wireless MC8780
Option GTM380.

More inclined towards the Option GTM380 module as Sony uses Option WWAN modules as well.

There is a empty slot at the back (battery bay area) whereby the sim holder is supposed to be. However this is an empty slot for me. Do I need to purchase a SIM holder as well? How would I connect the SIM holder?
I might also upgrade my current ABG WLAN card to the AGN.

Are there any other requirements that I may have missed out? For eg, bios stuff...


For dissecting of the Vaio TZ, I suppose the removal of the hinge caps aren't really necessary? I saw dissected pictures of the TZ with the hinge cap still on. I personally tried dissecting my TZ and got stuck at the right hinge. =.="

 

Hmm, any help?

 

Maybe these pictures will help:
http://kunkoku.livedoor.biz/archives/51560964.html

all the credits go to kunkoku..

 

WOW!!! That's some dissecting guide... Real detailed... Thanks a lot~ Really appreciate it... Now... If only I'd seen that earlier, would have avoided those scratches on the hinge caps and damage to my fingernails

Thanks once again~

 

Btw.. that limited edt Vaio TZ looks real sweet... I rmb that it was sold out real quick when launched on Sony JP...

 

Yeah, never seen it in real life..must be limited.
That site is great, every vaio gets dissected

 

If I get any TZ right now are they affected by the over heat issue?

 

It was their Vaio 10th anniversary special if I am not wrong.. the X505 edition, resembles the first classic slim and lightweight model... the X505.. They even had a special matching colour mouse, BMS33 to complement it.

 

You mean brand new TZ that's undergoing clearance? I'd doubt so. Those should be safe.

 

yeah!! thts what i thought!!

hehe!!
actually couldnt have figured that for a few months. Thanks a bunch V!! Great help. Now i am at peace knowing that my hard disk entirely mine now. phew! was misleading because of the difference in both base calculations shud be 8.3 GB. exact size of the hidden vista rec. partition that ppl mentioned!!

thanks though.

K

 

man i got the aw125j and i want to know if i can upgrade the hard drive and increase the ram to 8 gig the hard drive to 500 gig

 

I ve been wondering if a clean Vista install will help to speed up my TZ170?

Worse case I wish I can upgrade the regular HDD to SSD!

 

The upgrade to SSD would be the best bet for speeding things up.. Vista runs great with RAM and a speedy SSD or HDD. My boot times (TZ190) are still 20-40 sec after over 1.5 yrs of use.

 

Hello,

A local retailer friend is looking for TZ LCD replacements, which is the best website to order from based on Quality/Service/Price?

Thanks

 

Surprisingly dead thread. Given the relatively good deals that can be had on these right now, I had hoped there would be more discussion. Or has everyone moved on to the newer TT model?

I considered the TT. Too expensive for my wallet. $1,400 new for an SSD + HDD TZ versus $2,600 for the same configuration in a TT... almost double.

In terms of everyday usage for a non-gamer or non-power user, how much faster is the TT really going to be? The one advantage I see is being able to run 4GB rather than 2GB of RAM, but outside of that, meh...

(and in all candor, I like the look of the TZ better than the TT anyway).

Or is the fact that the TZ is now a year-plus-old model taken the shine off the apple?

 

Are you looking for a TZ?

If been using my TZ190 for about 1.5 years and plan to run it to the ground. Its basically a high-end netbook for me; travel, internet, skype, email, Office, some photoshop, flash, etc. I even use it to encode videos.

Its awesome for travel or sitting in front of the TV (like i am right now). I think it looks better than the TT as well; ive taken all the stickers off, so its all ghetto black.. i dont need chrome ascents or stickers on my laptop.

The TT has a slightly higher clockspeed, 3MB L2 (vs 2), 800MHz FSB (vs 533), and more ram. All of this is not that useful for day to day tasks... but, will come into play for things like photoshop or video playback or heavy multitasking (i rarely max out my ram).

If you do go for the TZ.. do yourself a favour and get one with an SSD.

 

I've chosen the TZ because the TT doesnt look as good and is heavier. The entry level TT comes in the gold/sand color over here with vista home premium (and no XP downgrade option....), I want my notebook to be black because that looks a lot better. And I run my TZ with XP on it, vista is just to much for the ultra low voltage cpu's for my taste. Booting takes just to long, normal tasks run fine though.

Performance of the TT should be a bit better, newer type CPU and the option to use more ram. But photoshop CS4 runs perfectly on my TZ. I'ts not my main machine for photo editing but while I'm on the road it does the job.

So if I had to buy a new machine right now it would still be my TZ!

 

Hi Sick Nick,

Can You compare speed of Photoshop CS3 and CS4 on Vaio TZ? On many forums people writing CS4 i so slow (problems with OpenGL graphics). Is it working OK on TZ? Do You have regular HD or SSD?

Best wishes

 

I didnt install CS3 on it (dont have it that long). Starting the software for the first time after a cold boot takes about 15 seconds while running on the battery in the Vaio Optimal profile. After closing it and opening again it's ready within 5 secons. It takes 2 seconds to open a 10 megapixel file from my Canon 40D, the rest goes smoothly (things like cropping, changing levels, rotating the image and applying filters, zooming in and out).

If I look under settings the GPU settings, the OpenGL drawing is not available, it's grayed out. Thats because the videochip of the TZ is not capable of these functions. So the OpenGL stuff shouldnt give any problems since it's not used.

Not to bad if you ask me. I have the model with a 120GB 4200rpm regular HD and 2GB ram.

 

Thank You for answer. I am using the same camera like You (Canon 40D) so my experience should be the same.

 

VGN-TZ290NDB on clearance from the Sony Outlet just got here about an hour ago.

A few initial thoughts:

1. Love the form factor and the screen! It's netbook-sized, but more bells and whistles and presumably more horsepower.

2. The extended battery is not obtrusive at all. It just props the keyboard up for a slightly better typing angle.

3. Out of the box it is UNGODLY sluggish. Presumably from Sony's crapware. That's about to go; am burning recovery DVDs now.

A few niceties that were not listed in the specs on Sony's site:

1. An external DVD/RW was included (this is an SSD + HDD dual drive model). Wasn't expecting that.

2. Downgrade DVDs to XP Professional were included. Am considering making this a dual-boot XP and Windows 7 machine.

It looks like I may not be able to boot from the SATA drive. In the BIOS there's only an option for "internal hard drive". Nowhere does it differentiate between PATA and SATA. Any thoughts?


Toys, toys, toys...