Vaio Duo 11 Owners Thread

Does anyone know if the battery in the Duo 11 is replaceable? And if it is available who would sell it?
I did try doing a quick Google search but mostly just saw offers for the external sheet battery.

I don't actually need it just yet, but I know that over time, eventually these things always need to be replaced (eventually).

 

Only by Sony, same issue as Apple with their Air and Retina laptops and most other tablets and ultrabooks. Not user changeable.

 

This is the main reason I just got the add on battery. The external battery discharges and charges first. Thus, for most tasks, I won't be using the internal battery at all and if the external battery deteriorates over time, it is easily replaced.

Cheers

 

Well, I know that in the case of apple, they have a very clear program where they lay out
the cost etc. for battery replacement.

I wonder if anyone is aware of Sony's plan for same.

Also, on apple there are after market ones available for those willing to do a little dyi.

I personally have no aversion to opening my unit up when the time comes.

So, to those that have already cracked open the Duo, did it look like there
were any impediments to self replacing the battery?

 

Yes that's probably a good idea and I'll likely end up getting one of those as well.

There is the downside that it does add an extra pound and a half however, which I expect will be noticeable,

(so I may not be so religious about keeping it always in place. )

Depending on what I find out about the cost and the effort of battery replacement, this will determine just how carefully I try to extend the longevity of the internal battery.

 

Hi Guys, does anyone know if there's some slots available for connecting wwan module (msata or mini pcie)? Thank you

 

Hmmmmm -- I don't remember seeing an extra one when I popped the lid off my machine (see post #157), but Anh got much farther than I did. I can't remember seeing one in his pictures.

As for the internal battery, I noticed that it comes off quite easily after getting the lid off -- I wonder what the odds are of getting extra Sony parts, for those of us who would rather replace the battery by ourselves in the future?

I'm using a Tekkeon MP3600 battery, tethered to the Vaio Duo using the smallest connector at 11 volts. It sure feels awkward, but the extra 5 hours really helps me out...

 

Great thanx, Hendhess for your work.

On your #157 post you wrote that you've also had to disassemble the wLan module. Does it looks like that? Новый открынный модуль Сьерра MC8780 HSDPA 3G WWAN 7.2Mbps свободно грузя (10121) I think to replace it)

I'm asking because its important for me to have both gps and wwan but wifi is not so important. However, i can always buy a usb wifi adapter.

 

Your picture shows that the part number for the battery is VGP-BPS31.
hopefully the aftermarket folks will have that one available when the time comes...

 

I upgraded my graphics card driver with the latest one from the Intel site and it was still flickering however this time it was showing the refresh rate as 40Hz so I'm thinking it was reporting it incorrectly as 60Hz before. I've changed it to 60Hz now and so far the flicker seems to be gone.

John

 

Or maybe it has a wireless card of such form-factor Option MO6712 WLAN WWAN WiFi 3G Combo Minipcie Half Mini Card 4 U FL Socket | eBay ?

 

Yes -- I believe it was a half-height form factor, like the Option MO6712 you described.

 

How did you manage to install the latest driver from the Intel site? When I try, it says that it is not the right driver (I think, because it is not validated by Sony?). Which one did you choose?

 

Download the driver from the Intel website. Get the one in .zip form. Unzip it to the directory of your choice. Then go to device manager for the display adapter, choose driver, update driver, browse my computer, let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer, have disk. Browse to the unzipped display driver directory and say OK. The new driver will be installed with no objections.

Ira

 

Aah, ok, got it ;-) Thanks a lot

 

Strangely I think it was objecting when I used the zip so I ran the setup.exe and it appears to have worked fine, I have the new driver and as another nice little touch with Windows 8 is that I noticed when you look at device properties it has its own list of events showing when the driver was updated and what files were modified. When I booted back up today the flickering was back but on checking display properties it was back to 40Hz again so I'm wondering if it's anything to do starting on mains power vs starting on battery.

John

 

The only slots I see are for an SD card, two USB ports, an Ethernet jack, and HDMI and VGA out. I don't think this has a PCMCIA slot.

 

Ok I'm following up to my own post. I did a complete reinstall of the OS using the Recover option (the one that formats the drive and puts the OS back). I then created my primary user account and installed everything I need to use there. Then I tested for a couple days. No problems. Then I created my second user account and installed the software. This time around, what I did was make sure none of the software is set to automatically launch upon boot or login. This includes Dropbox, Truecrypt, Gadwin Printscreen, and a bunch of other stuff.

It works fine. No more problems switching between users.

Also I've had the screen on around 50% brightness and I don't notice any flickering or lines

 

I also had a bit of weirdness after adding a second user account. As soon as I added the account, most of the Metro apps stopped working on both accounts. For example, when I touched the mail app, it would jump to the full screen version of the icon and then jump back to the Start screen. I could not get the apps to actually load and operate. After playing with it for a while, I gave up and did a full re-install of Windows. Now all is fine for both accounts. Very strange, but at least it is working well finally.

Ira

 

Edit the registry with regedit (or your favorite registry editor).

Search for all instances of the value "Friction". Set each instance to a small number. I have used 1.

After doing this I have found that the screen scrolls for quite a while after I give it a good swipe.

I can't take credit for this, I found this idea on the Microsoft Q&A website where a very helpful person had found this solution on a Lenovo x230 and passed it along.

Ira

 

I also had problems with the Metro apps that first time. As I recall, they disappeared completely on the second user account.

This time around, after configuring my first account, testing and making sure it was stable, I created a disk image backup of the drive so that I have a known good copy that I can restore from in case things become unstable again. I have found that this is a faster way to recover than going through the factory reinstall, setting my preferences, installing and configuring software, and all that.

 

I tried this and found 4 instances of "Friction". The value in there was 32 hex (50 decimal) which I changed to 1.

Afterwards I was not able to detect any change in the screen scrolling. Is there perhaps another change you made in addition to this one?

 

That is all I did. Perhaps I am suffering from the placebo effect. ;-)

Note, you do have to reboot before the change will take effect.

 

Definitely not placebo. The reboot did the trick

I forget how rarely one actually boots up from scratch anymore.

(so I had to endure the ENTIRE 10 seconds of boot-up instead of the normal instant on ).

 

I can confirm this WORKS like a charm (After reboot).
Basically, 4 instances are for each user you have on your laptop.
You only need CURRENT_USER to be changed.
Here is direct link:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Touch
Hit "Windows + R", type regedit.

 

I assume you mean Win+R to bring up the run box rather than Explorer or is there some trick to get the command through Explorer like the main start screen allows?

Thanks for the registry location, will have a look on my Vaio.

John

 

Does anyone has an issue with digitizer? it's sometimes loses a contact so i cant select anything on the screen for 2-5 seconds

Thx. Dont you remembe if there's an opportunity to insert a full size height wireless card? Maybe some rude tuning with hammer is required)... Because i cant live with the mind that my $2300 duo does not have 3g and gps

 

Does anyone have experience with the "Intel Wireless Display" feature?
Does it work well? is it worth setting that up with my HDTV?

 

Got my Duo 11 when they first came out, and the only problem was the light bleed on the bottom edges of the screen.

I returned it and had to wait almost a month for a new one, but got mine last week. This one still has the light bleed but not as bad as the first one.

I think with any tablet there will be light bleeding problems. I think if you all look at your models you have it but barely noticeable unless you're looking at something with a dark background or boot up.

Otherwise no problems. I did have a concern with the screen rotation getting stuck, but turned off the system and rebooted and works fine.

Amazing screen, great sound and quite functional. So far happy with my unit.

 

Sorry, it is just Win+R. My mind and my hand didn't work together.

 

Hi everyone,

Many thanks for the friction setting -- it greatly improved scrolling for me. Installing DragToScroll improved my middle-button scrolling as well.

My only remaining issues at this point are some connection issues with Citrix Receiver, which loses my work connection at random intervals, despite a constant WiFi connection. Interestingly enough, my Citrix issue happens on every Windows 8 machine I've tried so far -- perhaps it's something my IT department needs to address. Also, I'm still searching for an ideal PDF annotation program. BlueBeam Revu 6.5 is all right, but in my opinion, it's nowhere near as smooth and slick as Microsoft Reader, in which I still can't erase ink. I tried newer versions of BlueBeam Revu but those were too laggy for me when scrolling through large PDFs.

Extremal: Hmmmm... Based on the image I had and the images Anh took, I don't know if a full-height card would fit in there without some 'aggressive' modifications...

 

hendhess, you are not the only one with Citrix.
I am also lost the connection using RDP to my W2008 server.
This happened to all of my Win8 machines.
It is not an issue for your IT department. It is MS job to fix it.
My only minor issue is that I can't join my Duo to domain since it is Win 8, not Pro.
Pro pack is still expensive for me. $70 for just to be able to join to domain.

 

Because it's CURRENT_USER, you may not need to reboot. You can probably just log out and log back in for the change to take effect.

 

Found the solution to this on a Lenovo board of all places - I bet it has something to do with the high res screen:




I found out there is a registry setting that controls the inertia of the touch movement. Back in Windows 7 there was a UI (a page in the Pen/Touch Settings) that used to set this value. Obviously this one is missing in Windows 8, i wonder why, since there is no alternative and this setting is very important for a tablet operating system.



The key is:

The param "Friction" under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Touch]. You can set it to numeric values from 0-64. 64 means high friction, 0 means very low friction. Of course i chose 0 to make scrolling after swiping really fast. I needed a reboot to make this effective. Remember there are a couple of copies of this registry structure under [HKEY_USERS], you should set them too (execpt for the very improbable case that some user wants slow touch scrolling).

 

#1 -- Interesting -- I'll have to make some noise over in the Citrix forums... Maybe write a letter to Microsoft since I see no online way to send bug reports to them.

#2 -- A side note: I find it incredible how different zooming in IE10 with a touchscreen is versus IE10 with a desktop. IE10 zooms so smoothly with a touchscreen, even on Atom Z530-powered devices. Yet, zooming with a touchpad/mouse in IE10 on all PCs I've tried is laggy and choppy. I wonder if there's any way to force 'tablet-style' smooth zooming on a touchpad, or even with ctrl + middle button scrolling on other machines? Any manufacturer that achieves that would certainly interest me... (or has Logitech already done that with their touchpad?)

 

Hi,

Mine is on order and I'd like another power adapter and not spend $90 for it. Can anyone confirm that the adapter size is 4.8x1.7mm?

Thank you!

 

It's not about the size, it's about voltage and current.
Sony now has 3 different chargers but almost the same for P, X, and Duo.
Search ebay for AC10V5 will bring you what you want for Duo but really cheap.

Sent from my LT30at using Tapatalk 2

 

Have you tried the AC10V5 with the Duo 11?

The Duo 11 adapter is rated for 4.3 amps and it gets quite warm when in use, so I believe that the Duo 11 is drawing near full load.

I tried an after market charger that put out 2 amps. It charged very slowly, but if I tried to use the Duo 11 while it was connected to the charger, the charger would shut down because of excessive current draw.

I don't know how the AC10V5 would behave, but I did see that it is rated for only 2.9 amps.

 

Sometimes, the warm doesn't mean it is nearly full loaded.
I may concern about 2A rating, but at 3A, I believe it should be fine.

 

Hi guys,
just about the scrolling fix...I've tried it and yeah it changes the behavior but trust me, it's not right. It does make things a little better though.
e.g. when you zoom in on a page it's way too slippery now.

FYI I've checked on my Surface RT and the settings there are as default on the vaio. (50)

I'm not being critical and we probably won't ever get a real fix (so it is useful) but just bare this in mind.

 

Default settings could b the same, but it doesn't mean the results be the same.
Surface and Duo are totally different. Touch panel controller could be different, so the behavior could b different also.

Sent from my Sony Tablet S using Tapatalk 2

 

Since the default value of 32 (hex) is too high and, I agree that 0 or 1 ifeels a bit too low. What if a number like 10 or so were "just right".

I would try it myself but I don't have convenient access to my machine just now.

 

@ jadzia2000

I am thinking off buying a duo 11 (either that or an XPS 12).

The Screen quality is paramount to me and in all of the reviews that I read it was exalted. My question to you is how do you tell if a device has light bleeding problems?

 

If you see a bright light flashing through the edges of your screen that's a light bleed.

it appears to be a pixilation issue.

The ipad has this problem and some asus tablets as well.

My vaio duo has it on the edges of the bottom, but again only seen if you're screen is dark, example watching a movie with the letterbox you can see it on the edges but barely noticeable. Only if you're really looking for it.

 

Hi everybody,

I need help. How to use the powerpoint add-ins for annotation. Sony said that the Vaio Duo 11 comes with 3 special applications :- note anytime, active clip and powerpoint add-ins. I believe, the powerpoint add-ins to annotate during presentation is specially made by sony to be use with the stylus and it is different than the default annotation you can do normally (where you have to right click and click pen).

anybody knows how to download or load this add-ins ?

 

Does opening the duo 11 to upgrade the ssd void the warranty? I'd like to put a 256 GB ssd in.

 

It's not user upgradeable so I'm pretty sure the warranty will be voided if they can see that you have opened it. Perhaps check with Sony to confirm.

 

You can download it here
Sony eSupport - SVD11215CXB - Drivers & Software

 

Could you perhaps upload some pics?

 

Sorry, I know this isn't a big contribution to the discussion, but my status changed today and it ships tomorrow! Almost a week early.

Now if I could only find a sheet battery...