Vaio FZ Owners Official Owners Thread

That's interesting that adding 2gb of RAM improved the Vista experience index. When Vista calculates the index for RAM, it measures the speed and not the size of RAM available.

For example, for my desktop, when I don't overclock the RAM, I get 5.4, but when I overclock it, I get 5.9 (max index score that Vista will give as of now).

I don't think you would notice too much if you upgrade from 2 to 3GB. It would be a different story if you upgraded from 1GB to 2 or more GBs though.

 

I think people are becoming a bit too reliant on Vista's Experience Index to benchmark their computer. Sure, it's nice to boost the index rating, but it isn't the end-all, be-all of benchmarking. Far from it.

 

Hey buds, Congrats on being able to dual boot your FZ!

I got my FZ140E yesterday and even I want to work mainly on XP.

Please share yur secrets man!
1) How shall I partition the HDD without harming the Vista?
2) How do I install XP so that the thing boots with XP?

 

I don't know much about laptops, but when I first got my FZ-190 my hard drive was whisper silent. I turned it on today and out of nowhere, it became SO loud, very irritating, is there any way to fix this or is this even a serious issue? It sounds like an old broken laptop. I could hear it through the loud music I was playing on connected external speakers. Thanks.

 

No, you don't need a clean install, and Sony doesn't know what they are talking about -again-. It is a Vista problem but they seem to have fixed it over at MS, download and install these 2 patches here. They come in a 32bit and a 64bit version.

http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=41691

edit: i forgot to add that these two patches fix a lot of other Vista problems -or at least are supposed to- as explained on the page you find when you hit the link above. I've tried out the 32bit version and though it doesn't fix everything it does work for most parts and it hasn't caused me any problems.

 

I have one, here are my answers:


1. No.

2. No.

3. 1.5 hours watching a dvd, 2 to 2.5 hours browsing/e-mailing with w-lan on and on low power settings and the screen one or two click's less bright, and up to 3 to 3.5 hours on very low settings with everything off/on low just writing in word.

4. I have GTA San Andreas, Blazing Angels and GTR2 installed on mine, an they all run smooth on the highest settings.

5. Very very very pleased. I've used it every day for over a month now and i just love, it in every way.

 

How is the 0.3 MP webcam treating you, instead of the usual 1.3/2 MP equipped on other laptops?

 

Those "pre-release" patches include the one for fixing the remaining time calculation for copying files. I think the poster was asking about the remaining time calculation for the battery display. (Having never seen Vista on another laptop, I am not sure it ever supported a time remaining display for the battery though.)

Gary

 

You're right Gary, i must have been up to long.....i didn't read his question like i should have.

Oh well, can't hurt to post these patches here anyway i think

Sorry cecco11, can't help you there. As far as i know there's no 'cure' for that indeed.


@ navicalist;

the webcam really amazed me. I also have a Logitech webcam with the same spec's as the one built in to my FZ, but the image is much clearer and sharper, especially when there's not much light in the room.

 

i GOT MY FZ11S and the camera worked for the first day but thats it, now experiencing the same issues that a lot of people have reported about... anyone have any clue how to resolve?

 

Just tried to download the patches, but they are no longer available through the links provided at Neowin.net. I think it says in there these updates should be officially released in a week time, so I guess I'm going to have to wait.

 

Thanks for your post Storm3016

 

To owners of FZ11S: Where did you buy it from? Plus, how much warrenty did you get it?

 

^ laptopsdirect.co.uk for £800 with 1 yr manufacturer warranty. Play.com do an identical deal too i think.

 

How accurate are the ship dates for the fz190? I ordered on the 30th and it is supposed to ship on the 7th. After waiting for and canceling my order for a dell 1520 , the period between order and ship date seems very short on the fz.

 

Mine was 100% accurate.

Gary

 

Was it well packed, I mean the laptop from laptopsdirect.co.uk?

 

That's nice to here. I can't wait.

 

Very FAST shipping. Ordered my FZ190 CTO Thursday July 26 and it was at my house Tuesday July 31. Was shipped from CA to NJ in less than 1 day with overnight FedEx.

 

That was really fast. How do you like it so far?

 

Ordered mine on 6/12. It was supposedly out of stock. They said it would be available around 6/26. I received it on 6/15 FedEx Overnight, despite taking advantage of a free ground shipping promotion. I live only 90 miles away from San Diego though.

 

Yeah it was nice to get it so fast. I love it! Its my first laptop and I'm sure I made the right decision in purchasing this machine. The only gripe I have is a well known gripe with notebook's today, that is the amount of bloatware that comes with it. Alot of nonesense stuff like AOL and Spiderman promotional material. Other than that, love it. Very quiet too. Beautiful screen.

 

From seeing your posts, I can expect mine to arrive later this week or beginning of next week.

Giggs11
Did you see a noticeable performance boost with the added ram and faster hard drive? Are the memory slots under the laptop or under the keyboard?

 

The performance boost is incredible, however I should mention that I also managed to do a clean install of Vista. Took me two days to correctly install all the original drivers and get the hotkeys to work, but right now the machine is flying.
The memory slots are on the bottom of the laptop. It's a one screw hatch right in the middle.

 

Sony is amazing! I ordered on the 30th and my laptop just shipped today.

 

i noticed the fz190 cto dropped in price alittle

 

I was originally looking to get a Dell Inspiron but after looking through the Dell board, boy am I glad I went with Sony. Saw some folks ordered their Dell's in the begining of July and now have estimated ship dates later this month. Sony's not messing around. They rock!

 

This happened to me after I uninstalled some junk programs. I did a full recover of C: using "VAIO Recovery Center" and it is fine now.

 

Does anyone know how to disable the bluetooth?

 

I am planing to get a sony card and avail $100 off of my vaio purchase.

BTW the fz cto price is slashed by $100 now.

 

i went to sonystore in canada and a sales rep told me the option should be out in canada in sept. can anyone confirm that, and if not true im assuming we canadains can just order from states...

 

I'm assuming you haven't removed applications from your computer yet.
There should be a square green and blue icon in your taskbar next to the clock, displaying "LAN" in the center and a little "B" letter in the upper right corner. This is the "Wireless Device Switch" utility and the "B" means that the Bluetooth is enabled. Open it and you'll see the options.

 

Hey guys, I'm now also the proud owner of an FZ11s.

Likes;
It's gorgeous, very quiet (no rolling waves or anything), great screen.

Dislikes;
Jeez, what a lot of crapware. Battery is just a bit too loose, but nothing serious. AV button seems to just open Vista. Any solution to that yet?

I've tried to use the clean install topic someone here made, but since it's based on an american version it's pretty much useless. I'm still afraid of accidentally removing some driver I need. So if anyone here knows what should go on the european versions, I'd be much obliged.

So far I've updated windows, and installed video drivers from laptopvideo2go. I've also partitioned the drive into 2. Anything else I need to do to get it to go even faster?

 

Are you talking about my clean install topic? If so what does not apply to a European version? I'd like to update the document to give folks some indication as to what does and what does not apply.

Gary

 

Not likely, but does Sony pricematch if I ordered just 3 days ago?

 

Hi Gary, yes I think it was your topic. Well some things are similar, but a lot of software isn't installed on my laptop. For instance AOL, the spiderman movies, are probably US only. If I have time I'll try to figure out what is and what isn't useful, and post it here.

 

Thank god you don't have that stuff. However, that isn't going to change anything with respect to his clean install instructions.

 

Let me know what you find. I'll add the info to the document and then repost it.

Gary

 

Recieved my FZ11L today, took all afternoon to gut out all the rubbish but definately think I got my moneys worth in the end... If Id have found this earlier I wouldve kept a better record...

Only complaint is that sony were VERY shady about giving the full graphics specs out - i was under the impression that the l and s had the same graphics until it was too late - although hopefully the gap between 64 and 128 isnt too large... Maybe it serves me right for being too trusting.

 

I just got my VGN-FZ190 CTO and I'm actually really quite happy with it (2 hours later). I had read through this entire thread before I bought it.

About the 2 hours, the computer is a POS with all the crap Sony puts on it. It boots significantly slower with their Sony-Crapware. It took a long time to uninstall most of it but afterwards the computer just worked great. I ran TuneUp Utilities to clean up the registry and "defrag" it and ran Diskeeper and its really zippy.

Just thought I'd give my two cents...

 

finally installed the 2x 2gb of ram and it recognises just over 3gb as expected and i can confirm that it runs at 3gb dual channel. performance of after effects is notably much faster and photoshop. boot up time seems about the same.

 

what kind of ram did you put in?

 

I also just installed 2x 2gb of mushkin pc5300 ram. Vista detects 3.1 gb. The system runs nicely with the additional ram and the 7200 rpm hard drive.

 

Wow, I haven't received my FZ190 yet and the price dropped $100!!!! Ordered it on 7/26, supposed to arrive on 8/3. A little surprised they dropped it so much.

 

are these normal temps of tz190??

http://img452.imageshack.us/img452/78/untitledfn6.jpg
http://img468.imageshack.us/img468/679/untitledrn0.jpg
do you recommend a cooling pad??

 

Those temps definately aren't normal...

 

why are they so high?? i had this laptop for like 4 -6 days only.. i uninstalled alot of bloatware already did disk cleanup defrag registry clean up

 

I just ordered my vaio FZ-190 CTO using the sony card I got today. But the order status says "on hold". Why is the order on hold?

 

Yes! I just got my FZ190CTO this evening I'm sooo happy.

 

You need to call them, they did the same thing to me. Apparently they need to verify if the order is legit. The actually left me a message and told me to call back to verify I placed the order or it would be cancelled.