Vaio Duo 11 Owners Thread

Can you give a link? I don't see it. Amazon.de has it, but it's not on stock..

 

Has anyone done a clean install of Windows 8 and gotten rid of the Sony recovery partition? I am wondering what their HDD storage levels were like. I was about to do so, but then remembered that Win 8 seems to have recovery options as well, and so a new recovery partition might be created anyway. If I'm only going to gain 3 or for gigabytes by replacing my Sony recovery partition with a Microsoft one... there's little point. On the other hand if I am gaining 20GBs that may be something worthwhile.

Does anyone have any experience here?

 

It's worth to take over recovery partition. It requires a 32gb flash drive to create recovery backup even though actual size is about 24gb. Recovery partition is now at the end of the drive.

Sent from my LT30at using Tapatalk 2

 

I've had no luck getting one, someone here in the Netherlands ordered one from a site in Japan where they basically allow you to buy it from a shop then they handle the international part but the cost looked hefty. I only saw it briefly on amazon.co.uk buy it wasn't in stock, it was from a marketplace seller and the cost was ridiculous - something like £100 in total. It's immensely frustrating that we seem to get a very poor deal cost wise for the Vaio Duo 11 and cannot buy any of the accessories for it which are freely available in the US plus the customer support from Sony EU is frankly disgraceful for any product, never mind a more premium orientated machine like the Vaio Duo 11. I got in touch with one of the Sony stores and they're saying mid-January so looks like I'm just going to have to wait. There's a lot of people on ebay selling cases they claim to fit the Vaio Duo 11 but I don't think they will fit, I spent a while in a PC shop here trying out a variety of cases and none of them did fit well because of the Vaio's odd shape. It certainly doesn't fit in 11.6in sleeves or cases because it's actually wider than a 12in machine and the 13in cases are just too big, they don't hold the Vaio in place.

John

 

I'm really loving the Duo 11 except for the sloooooow inertial scrolling. If I can find a fix for that I'll be pretty happy with it.

 

So true. Have you guys tried emailing Sony support? If enough of us complain they'll eventually fix it.

 

So where you able to reclaim all that space with a clean install, or did the Windows 8 install create it's own Microsoft recovery partition that is nearly as large?

 

But if you do a clean install, you lose all Sony software. Does the Vaio come with an install cd that contains all software?

By the way I cancelled my order @ Sony NL. I could buy a 3 week old Vaio Duo, i7, 8GB, 256GB SSD for EUR 1300. Seems like a sweet deal.

 

HI Facedown,

Ordered the sleeve from a Japanese site. It's currently in customs at Schiphol Airport. Just got my credit card receipt. Total costs paid to the Japanese firm is around 67 euros which includes shipping. Don't know yet what the import tax will be.

Remember when you place your order that you have to send a confirmation reply that you accept the total costs including shipping and handling. Forgot the reply myself initially which delayed my order. My Duo arrived today. Ordered the i5/256GB/8GB version. Didn't have the free cpu upgrade with my order, only a discount with the ssd upgrade.

Below is the link.

Rakuten:

 

I ordered mine from Sony because it had the option for a screenprotector. This option wasn't available at the beginning.

 

Thanks but I cancelled my order at Sony and bought a 2nd hand Vaio Duo, which includes a sleeve (not the official one, but another 11.6" Sony netbook sleeve).
I saw today that both the free cpu upgrade and SSD / memory discount are not available anymore at Sony.nl. It's a EUR 200 price increase compared to yesterday! The version I bought is now almost eur 1900.

 

I everyone I am really thinking about buying one of these units. I want to get the i5 but would like to know if it would be possible to upgrade the Ram. The i7 setup is a kind of expensive.

 

Newegg.com has stock right now on both the svd11215cxb ( i7) and the i5 limit one per customer let us know.... mine will get here mon or tue

 

I ordered Ready-to-Ship i5 model and found out RAM is not upgradable because on-board is 2GB, not 4GB.
I also returned it to get gift card and then ordered i7 for the total of $1468 after tax, expedite shipping and 10% education discount.
I also got a DSC-W690 camera free because they canceled my previous order during my payment card lost and waiting for new card to arrive.
At this moment, there is no Configure-to-Order model on US site.

 

Hi. I still debating getting whether to get the Duo (also looking at the Helix and Taichi, thought it doesn't look like those will be out for quite a while). I have a few somewhat random questions that I'd be grateful for an answer, if you Duo owners can help me out!

1) For VPC-Z1 owners: what are the speakers like compared to the VPC-Z1? The VPC-Z1 speakers are no better than my smartphone (and I understand the most recent Z's speakers are even worse), which means skype usage in noisy environments is pretty impossible without headphones.

2) How reflective is the screen with the screen protector? The Z's is glossy, but its coating helps a lot to reduce reflections, so I'm hoping the screen protector has a similar effect on the duo.

3) Can you use the the sheet battery as a sort of power dock? i.e. if you have the sheet battery plugged in, can you drop the duo onto it to charge its internal battery?

4) One of the main complaints in the notebookcheck review is that the brightness halves when you unplug it and it's impossible to bring it back to full brightness (making it difficult to see outside) - is that what you've found? (If so, hopefully, they'll change this with a bios update).

Thanks!

 

I migrated from the VPCZ1 as well. So I understand your questions.

1. The Duo's speakers are a HUGE improvement from the Vaio Z speakers. They are significantly louder.
2. I have the screen protector, but never installed it. The Duo is unfortunately much more reflective then the VPCZ1, but its screen quality is also better, and the IPS technology used has a lot going for it. From the tabletpcreview.com forum's I've read that the screen protector DOES reduce glare, but at the expense of clarity (as to be expected).
3. No, the sheet battery does not recharge the main battery unfortunately. However, the Duo does pull from the sheet first, so that you can put it away when its out of charge. Also, you can charge the sheet battery separately for those times when you want an extra charge but can't be at the desk with your laptop
4. I haven't noticed this issue. However, I haven't paid much attention b/c the Vaio's screen even at its lowest setting is probably the same as any other laptop set to 50%. I rarely go up to 100% on the Duo, even sitting outside, its rarely needed.

Ohh, and I've noticed that the Duo seems faster then my old Z. That may not hold true if I needed the resources of the native graphics or needed to harness the processor's full capabilities, but for everyday tasks like starting the computer up (takes 5-6s on the Duo) or connecting to two monitors, the Duo outshines the Z.

 

That sounds like a power management setting issues. In my Z2, if you change the default brightness of unplugged when you are plugged (or vice versa), the setting will not get saved. They most likely are just experiencing minor bugs in power management software.

 

@ashers - FN + F6 to brighten the display?

 

My i5 6gb 128gb is here tomorrow... can't wait. Anyone here with trouble using ntrig stylus? Has sony updated drivers? Thx

 

How well does the sleeve fit?

John

 

Hello everyone, I just bought the duo 11 and I'm very pleased with it. I do have a question: I'd like to be able to purchase movies that I can download and watch off-line. What would be the recommended service to use? The "Video" app on the homescreen pulls up the Xbox movie store which doesn't seem to offer the capability to search for titles. I'd really like something such as Amazon Instant Video which has a large catalog and lets me search for titles and purchase the ones I like.

 

The sleeve feels like rubber material and it fits perfectly even with external battery.
It also has a place to hold the pen.

 

I have been researching this recently, I due like it allot.
Any students using this? I'd love to hear from you.

I plan to take it to class and back home so I'll be using it constantly.
I have been eying the i7/8GB version. Where's the cheapest place to get it?

 

I am the only student who uses Duo in our class. Most students use MB.

Sent from my LT30at using Tapatalk 2

 

I was referring to the 11.6in generic netbook sleeve, not the official case it sounds like you are referring to? (which frustratingly cannot be bought in Europe)

John

 

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious but need to check - are you using the search button on the charms bar? (the bar you pull in from the right, search is the top option). I've just checked it on my Vaio and when I use that search option it brings back results on the Video application.

What can be a little confusing about Windows 8 is that the touch applications don't always have their own settings and instead the intention seems to be to use a standard set so the search button will behave differently depending when you choose it, if you press it in the general screen it will search applications and files but if you press it within an application that has searchable content, it will search within the application. The settings button (also on the charm bar) is the same which I didn't initially realise, the lower half is always system wide settings (power, network, volume etc.) but the top half are specific to the application so if you can't seem to find settings, this is where they are likely to be.

John

 

For a student's needs, Onenote is excellent at keeping you organized, and giving you the ability to import pretty much any file type so that you can annotate it and be able to search it. Plus OneNote can also search your handwritten notes. With OneNote the Duo can pretty much replace all of your notebooks, binders, and even some textbooks.

The battery life isn't the greatest. If you are only doing school stuff, you'll get a bit over 4hours. If you get the sheet battery life, you get 8 hours. So whether or not you need the sheet depends on your class schedule. I never bring the charger anywhere, just opting to bring the sheet battery for when I know I'll be out all day.

The MS PDF Reader app for Windows 8 unfortunately is useless for nTrig users, since we can't erase. So if you have PDF ebooks, or nortes, you'll probably want to print them to OneNote until MS gets its act together.

 

notebookcheck review. has anybody found a toshiba or other brand 512gb ssd drive that will work with the vaio duo 11?

 

I doubt there is 512gb for Duo at this moment. The highest is about 480gb from mushkin

 

Hi all. Just at the office now where my Surface RT lives...the inertial scrolling is so much better, we need to start taking this more seriously.
How can we organize ourselves to make a constructive effort to fix it or complain to Sony?

FYI I have done a clean reinstall on my Duo 11 of Windows without installing much / any of the vaio trash.

 

The fit is quite good (tight at the sides, 1cm of space at the bottom because of the quare corner design of the Vaio duo. Top fits OK too. Problem is there no no real space to fit the pen. You could put it at the bottom of the sleeve but I'm worried it may scratch the Vaio.

 

Could you give us a step for step guide of the clean install?

 

Could anyone help me locating Windows 8 Key?

 

I found out through Sony support that I could locate it from the BIOS.
Can anyone make sure of that because I didn't buy it yet?

 

Hi bam3000
If you install a clean version of Windows 8, it seems to pick up the key from (...unknown....UEFI related...).
Basically Windows activated itself and never prompted for a key. I was most impressed!

 

Hi Vozie
I don't have much tips or tricks tbh. I couldn't get the damn thing to boot from USB (I'd made a "bootable" USB from the official .iso file for Win8 setup, using the Windows 7 bootable USB tool).
So I just ran setup from within the crapware install of Windows. These days that does do a "clean" install anyway (so long as you didn't want to mess around with partitions).
Basically all the key folders (\Windows, \Users, \Program Files) get moved into "C:\Windows.Old"

You can then delete them at your leisure.

 

That's excellent news!

Yes, I just saw that. I may order it with the protector as I really hate glossy screens - though the brightness should help to cut that down a lot.

That's a pity. I never had a docking station before the VPC, but after using it for a couple of years, I'm going to miss it - it's going to take me a while to get used to unplugging everything again!

Yes, they quote a brightness of 400nit on notebookreview, so I could imagine that hammers the battery pretty quickly. I can see why Sony would force a brightness reduction so that they can offer the battery times they claim. Maybe the guys at notebookreview missed a setting but they're usually pretty thorough. However, this isn't a dealbreaker for me.

So you can connect two monitors at the same time? That's very handy. As to the speed, the i7 (which you have) is £320 more than the i5 at the moment, so I'll probably go with the lower i5 - hopefully the difference is not too significant.

So, many thanks for your response on this. I think I might be pulling the trigger on one very soon!

Sorry to bother you with a few more questions,mainly subjective:
1) I find the fan on the VPCZ1 quite noisy even when it's idle (in a quiet environment). Does the Duo fan seem quieter?
2) Did you have any issues adjusting to the smaller keyboard and smaller screen?
3) How are you finding the optical trackpoint - I'm a thinkpad trackpoint fan so I'm disappointed they didn't use that. I would have thought that touching the screen all the time to click on buttons/menus in Word/Excel etc (which is the alternative) would be a lot slower, but maybe I'm wrong - maybe that'll change when I start using the Duo.

Thanks again!

 

where did you get the official iso? thought you have to buy a key from ms so you can download.

you did a "refresh"? Well besides for cleaning for the bloats, you can delete the recovery partition to get more space.

i thought about clean up everything and putting on windows 8 pro, just read somewhere it might be trouble before the install will read the key off the bios instead of the one for the pro.

 

I got the ISO from my MSDN subscription. I'm sure you can find a torrent of the ISO anywhere, I can give you the filename and MD5 hash if you want.
As it activated automatically, it activated with non-pro. I then chose "add features to windows" and put in a Pro product key which 'upgraded' my install to windows 8 pro after a further reboot.

Yes I would have liked to delete the recovery partition and probably will eventually...but I got tired of failing to get USB boot working.

 

This is a Windows 8 problem, not a Duo 11 problem. The Dell XPS 12 exhibits the exact same behavior, as documented by NBR's review. The simple solution is to turn off auto brightness adjustment and manually adjust brightness with the slider in charms > settings (very quick to adjust in any program since it's right there in charms; no need for auto adjustment).

 

Sorry, I guess I had both misspoken and misread your question on monitors. I only extend the screen to one monitor, and notice that the Duo keeps cooler, and remains more responsive then my VPC-Z1. I have not tried connecting the Duo to 2 additional monitors. How does someone do that? They use the VGA plug as well as the HDMI, or is there a special splitter to buy? I can potentially try connecting my monitor and my TV to the Duo to test this out if no one chimes in.

1. The fan is significantly quieter then the VPCZ's fan... there are also extra settings for the fan in the Duo's Vaio Control Center. These enable you to even set the fan to silent, which apparently may throttle CPU usage as needed.

2. Smaller keyboard was a very fast adjustment, and I have 0 complaints. Smaller screen.... well, the Duo is closer to your face both when being used as a tablet, and when being used as a laptop due to the slider design, also Sony has the DPI scaling by default turned up higher on the Duo. So even though my Z had a 1600x900 screen and my Duo has a 1920x1080 mated to a smaller screen, I never found myself squinting or lacking desktop space. To be honest I never felt the difference when I made the move down to the Duo, but oddly I did feel it when I went back to the Z to prep it for being sold and noticed how much more space I had. At the end of the day regardless of its usability, I'm still annoyed at Sony for not including a 13.1 inch screen given the size of the Duo.

3. I'm disappointed in the trackpoint as well. I don't understand why Sony went the way they did. I use a Bluetooth mouse at my desk, and bring the stylus with me when I leave the house. However, I have turned the speed settings for the trackpoint up significantly so that I can cover the majority of the screen in a single swipe, and this has made the trackpoint more usable for me. Its nowhere near perfect, but I am getting used to it and I am much more proficient with it then I was on day one. Regardless, it could never be the only input method for me, thankfully it is not.

 

I'm a sysadmin, been working with computers for 13 years. I never heard of a Windows key being in the BIOS.

Just to be sure, I double-checked my Duo 11 and nope, didn't see one there.

 

Its not visible from the Bios screen, but its in an activation table that's stored in the BIOS ROM. So you'll never need a key, whenever you install Windows 8.

FYI anyone looking to be able to use Win8 Pro's HyperV to run Virtual Machines will need to upgrade to Sony's latest Bios version from the site. I was experimenting, and couldn't get things to work until I updated the BIOS.

 

Is it Sony thing or it will be the same with other vendors?

 

No - don't worry, was just curious. I was assuming you had a monitor plugged into the HDMI and a second plugged into the VGA. The Intel card is meant to support 3 monitors, but the Sony's Vaios tend not to support this.

That's great news. The VPCZ1 also has a "silent" setting in the VCC which throttles CPU usage to keep the fan speed down. But as the fan is noisy at its lowest setting, that does't help when working at night!

Yes, not being a trackpad fan, I tend to always have a mouse with me - I'll just keep doing that.

Thanks again for your help!

 

Press ASSIST button in stead of power button will bring you a boot menu. Then F2 to go to BIOS, so you can enable external boot and order.

 

Interesting. How long has that been going on? Seems unusual to hard code it into the BIOS. Are you sure it's not in one of the many hidden partitions that come with the system? That would make more sense to me, but I might be out of touch with how things are done in Windows-land nowadays.

 

It's been going on a while now, it's used to activate OEM systems without needing a key to be entered - the feature is called SLIC:

BIOS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is possible to extract the key data and to replace it but it's not a normal feature of the system and absolutely not something an end user should be suggested to do.

John

 

I am sorry but I have to say that 13 years as sysadmin may still be out dated.
I have totally wiped out the SSD for fresh install and Windows still activated as normal version even I have pro version disc.
Before, Sony encoded machine ID, CMOS password to 128 byte EEPROM to all VGN models.
Later they moved them to 16Mbit SPI ROM. This is a trend to encode everything within SPI because there is a lot of free space left.
This is not only Sony, but all other laptop makers are using SPI chips nowaday for their products.

 

Update: I went back to the shop today and inked in Onenote for another 20 minutes. The inking was much more responsive (don't know why, it was the same machine, re-boot or the installation stabilizing?). I went on and calibrated the pen to get the dot at “the tip” of the pen and not “beneath it” (pen tip obscuring the line). After this I must say that inking in Onenote was excellent. Compared with my current Lenovo X201T (Wacom) it had higher precision (particular at the edges) and less lag especially when marking large piece of ink with the lasso. The pen pressure function is not as “real pen like” as on the Lenovo, but absolutely good enough for Onenote where this functionality is not so critical. To conclude, this version of n-trig seems to be even better than Wacom for Onenote note taking. Speculating in a driver update someday it could get even better…
Being more careful at the outset with palm/pen I had less problem with palm rejection.