Vaio FZ Owners Official Owners Thread

The whole point of Sony having you make the DVD set is for you to be able to recover the machine back to its out of the box state in the event that the hard drive is replaced or you can't access the hidden partition. Point is NO you do NOT need the hidden partition to use ANYTHING on the recovery DVD's.

Gary

 

I was wondering the same thing. Anyone know where to get the screencover/lid and a bottom plate.
I have some scratches on there and I dropped my laptop so the bottom plate is damaged.

 

Although it is reasonable to assume that this is the case, when I tried to reinstall the Vaio recovery utility today, the program just wouldn't install (the installer failed to initialize). I guess that restoring this particular app without recovering the entire system is a bit tricky...maybe it has certain dependencies which I haven't been able to identify. Can someone with a "stock" FZ tell me if the Vaio recovery utility is an integral part of another application?

 

I have a stock FZ and a clean installed FZ. I can assure you that you do NOT need the hidden partition to use the two DVD recovery set, or to reinstall any of the applications if you insert disk #1 while Vista is running. These two DVD's are totally self contained.

Gary

 

Well, when I try to install the recovery utility (VSRU.exe, from /Recoverydisc/Sony), the installer just won't launch. In your clean install guide I noticed that the recovery software was installed together with your Sony Utilities DLL and also that you could launch the application from the DVD (not prior to the installation of the Utilities DLL though!). Unfortunantely, in my case none of those things applies.

I suspect there's a problem with the configuration settings of the VSRU installer (VSRU.ini).

Here's what's in my VSRU.ini file:

[VSRU]
Mode=HDD
Type=OSR

[RCVPRT]
Size=11920

Maybe my recovery utility requires the hidden recovery partition (RCVPRT) to function and has to run from the HDD after all?

 

No, that is NOT what my guide said at all. What it says is that when I used the recovery software from the DVD to install the Sony Utilities, I noticed that the recovery software had also installed itself so I no longer had to keep running from the DVD. I am not sure what the issue is that you are having. But I can tell you it is not the recovery partition.

I have no idea what VSRU is. That is NOT the application and recovery launcher.

Lets' take a different approach to this. With Vista running put disk number one of your two dvd recovery set in the drive. Autorun should cause the recovery launcher to start up all by itself. You should not need to install ANYTHING manually from the two DVD set.


I just went back to the FZ clean install thread and there are differences between the FZ11 (European) and FZ190 (US) models and how the dvd recovery disks work. See this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2305415&highlight=FZ11#post2305415 Then read on for a few of pages.

You might want to go back to that thread and search the thread for references to an FZ11. Do you have two or three DVD's in the recovery set?

Gary

 

Gary, you don't have to capitalize words because what your guide says is:

" Add the applications in this sequence: (Note when available I used the items downloaded in step 5 above, otherwise I used the Recovery DVD. Look at the tables for the specifics.)

a. Sony Utilities DLL – Installed with no issues (...)"

Since you don't specify whether you used the recovery utility or not to restore the Sony Utilities (in contrast with other applications where you are very specific about the use of the recovery software), since they can be downloaded from the Sony Support website and since the source file from the support website is listed in your drivers/software table, I (logically) assumed that you used the standalone installer and not the recovery software to install the Sony Utilities.

As a result of the above I thought that, for your computer, the recovery utility was installed as part of the Sony Utilities.

What you should have written in your guide to help clarify things a little bit is what you wrote in your previous post.

 

Sorry, I didn't see your edit. I have three DVDs in the recovery set (two System Recovery Discs and one Application Recovery Disc) none of which has a useful autorun function (The autorun of the ARD does nothing while the ones in the SRDs prompt you to boot the machine with SRD 1 to perform a syster restore - not useful at all)

I'll have a look at the link you sent me, thanks very much.

 

It doesn't really matter which way I installed the Sony Utilities. The recovery utility is not part of that package. We can either nit pick the wording of the guide (used by lots of folks without a problem) or we can try to get to the root of your trouble. Your choice.

Did you look at the part of the thread I pointed out in my last reply, where we tried to work through the differences in a European Recovery set? Do you have a two disc set or three? If it's three like in those messages in the thread, the recovery app should be on the third disk. But again, I don't think it is there as an installer. I am pretty sure it is an exe ready to run.

What made you think the VSRU installer was something you needed to do? If you can provide me a link or some background I can try to cross reference to the stuff on my DVD set.

Gary

 

Thats odd. My edit was at 5:16PM and your reply was at 5:51 PM. You should have been able to see it. I'm not sure why it didn't show up. Well, we're even... big ol' grin... I didn't see your second reply while I was answering the first. I had a phone call mid way through my reply.

I am still curious what led you to the VSRU installer? What is on the ARD? I was pretty sure that the other FZ11 folks had told me it had an autorun.

Gary

 

My experience with the discs is that they wont work in reliable way, why?, I dont even want to know about but for practical purpose you should try to repeat a failed install of whatever you might want. Cant say about autoplay since I hate it and disable for everything so I had to start recovery manually.
I had to try few times till I got all the way through to install something. Reminds me of Acronis disk director, often it just starts but there is no mouse, the only way is restart and if not by first then by 3rd time it works.
That is exactly like that with Vaio recovery discs , had it on different models. It can be my "fault" since I either do complete clean installs or remove most rubbish softwares, never used Vaio with all that "original genius" software for simple reason that it makes it (for me) unusable.
Like with most manufacturers the Recovery partition will be installed again with full factory re install but its presence on HD is not relevant for using the DVDs. Whatever Sony support said, I wouldn't bother, heard enough of idiotic statements from supports of electronic companies, nothing can surprise me anymore. I gave up on Sony support already 2-3 of my Vaio generations back, just waste of time and nerves.

 

aviray,

First line of support is made up of folks who are only allowed to read from scripts. In the four or five times over the past ten years when I had to deal with Sony support, I just refuse to deal with them and ask to be escalated to tier two immediately. I'm nice but firm about that, saying I've been in IT for almost 40 years. If I get push back, I ask for a supervisor. Every single time I have gotten escalated to tier two, and those folks are actually quite good. They listen, think, investigate etc. Not like the robots on tier one. Mind you that's no slight on the tier one folks. They are hired and paid to be robots.

Gary

 

anyone has tried windows 7 on fz21?

 

I thought about trying it but I read that there wasnt enought support forit yet and I dont feel like searching for drivers everyday.

 

I have been running Windows 7 beta on my FZ4000 since February and absolutely LOVE IT!

I just did a fresh install of build 7057, which took less than 20 minutes. The only drivers that will have to be installed manually are for the card reader.

The volume controls and FN keys are lost.... Which is why I am here. Anyone now of a solution? I know that it was an issue when people downgraded to XP as well.

 

Did you do a clean install of Win 7 or an update from Vista?

Gary

 

The first beta install was an upgrade. When I loaded build 7057, it was a reformat and clean install.

I searched the esupport.sony site for the drivers and didn't see anything that looks obvious

 

Did the FN keys work the first time, when you did it the upgrade way? If so then you just need to install some of the ancillary Sony apps that enable the function keys. The Sony libraries and event service stuff. Report back and if the upgrade version did have functional FN keys, I'll get you the specifics on what you need to install.

Gary

P.S. If the upgrade had working FN keys, you might be able to figure this out for yourself by looking at my FZ clean install guide for Vista. The link is in my signature.

 

Gary - They did not work when I upgraded to build 7000.

would it be the 2 drivers under "notebook control and utilities" on the esupport site?

I REALLY appreciate your help

 

In my guide the three things you need under VISTA to get the FN keys working are labeled:

Sony Utilities DLL
Setting Utility Series
VAIO Event manager


They were all installed as part of a single package: SOOOTH-37300000-US.EXE

Send me a link to the page you are referring to and I'll look.

Now a word of WARNING: I have not messed with Win7 yet. Anyone of these may totally hose your system. So proceed with UTMOST caution. I would image your C: partition before you start, if I were doing this.

Gary

 

It fails and states "this software is not intended for your model."

I found these two

SOAVCC-13988600-US.EXE - VAIO Control Center - failed
SOAOTH-42200000-US.EXE - Notebook utilities - Sucessful

regardless, my FN and volume keys work. The only issue is the "visual volume indication" is not visible. But, it's not a big deal.

Thanks!

 

You could use universal extractor to extract the drivers from Sony exe package and let Windows update the driver from the extracted files.
Link http://legroom.net/software/uniextract

 

But 4gb is blocked by motherboard or bios.

When you put 2gb in one , bios is showing 1gb. Now i have 2x2gb, and bios is showing 2gb. There is no diffrence 32 or 64bit in this case, because bios should recognize it.

Sony wouldnt give any new bios to fz1 series, so the only hope is user modification bios. But as i konow there isn't

Current bios version R0050J7. I found on italian page there is so fresh version:

http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/archive/index.php/t-1554987-p-22.html

look for the acrobat73 post

 

Thinks for the tip coolguy. I tried it but no luck.

 

Well, I guess we're even then

What led me to the VSRU installer is the fact that "VAIO Recovery Utility" is listed under the program description for this file.

The ARD contains mainly four folders named APR, APR2, APR3 and APR4 (APR standing for APplication Recovery perhaps?) each of which contains a varying number of compressed .pac files (SP/WS-xxxxxx-xx.pac). The ARD also contains four other .pac files named Sony, Sony2,..,Sony4. The KCAP application can be used to decompress those files. I found that the Sony.pac file contains a list of the applications present in the recovery disc (that's how I managed to recover specific applications) but unfortunantely Roxio is not one of them:

"Sun Java VM" SP-006356-10.apr
"MS Works" SP-008670-02.apr
"Adobe Reader" SP-014561-00.apr
"Adobe Photoshop Elements" SP-013750-02.apr
"Adobe Premiere Elements" SP-013815-01.apr
"Adobe Acrobat Standard" SP-013810-01.apr
"VAIO Entertainment Platform" SP-013485-02.apr
"SonicStage Installer 1-5" SP-007028-03.apr
"SonicStage Installer 2-5" SP-009777-07.apr
"SonicStage Installer 3-5" SP-007842-06.apr
"SonicStage Installer 4-5" SP-011969-14.apr
"SonicStage Installer 5-5" SP-012255-03.apr
"SonicStage Mastering Studio Installer 1-2" SP-010677-07.apr
"SonicStage Mastering Studio Installer 2-2" SP-009920-02.apr
"SonicStage Mastering Studio Audio Filter 1-2" SP-010678-07.apr
"SonicStage Mastering Studio Audio Filter 2-2" SP-007849-06.apr
"DSD Direct" SP-014818-00.apr
"DSD Playback Plug-in" SP-014828-00.apr
"DSD Direct Player" SP-014821-00.apr
"VAIO Media Installer 1-5" SP-013610-03.apr
"VAIO Media Installer 2-5" SP-013566-01.apr
"VAIO Media Installer 3-5" SP-013491-02.apr
"VAIO Media Installer 4-5" SP-013611-01.apr
"VAIO Media Installer 5-5" SP-009079-02.apr
"VAIO Video & Photo Suite 5ch for BD" SP-014686-01.apr
"Click to DVD BD" SP-014816-01.apr
"Click to DVD Menu Data 1" SP-007819-03.apr
"Click to DVD Menu Data 2" SP-014526-01.apr
"VAIO Edit Components" SP-010748-03.apr

The SRD1 also contains a number of compressed .sny files (sony.sny, sony2.sny,...,sony7.sny). What I will try next is to use the Universal Extractor that coolguy mentioned above to see if I can access those files in case the Roxio installer is present in any of them.

 

Anyone installe vista 64 on a FZ? and is it worth it for causal computer use? It just hate going to best buy and messing with a demo laptop and it jsut seems so much faster than mine when I have more ram and a better cpu.

 

Dear Forum Members,

I recently started experience blue screens which forced restarts on my FZ290. I realized that my Nvidia 8400 GT graphics card was the cause. When the computer would actually boot into windows, the startup screen would have weird lines and dots all over the screen. And then when I finally got into Windows, my computer would eventually Blue Screen and restart again, usually due to my screen saver or sometimes randomly. I even uninstalled the Nvidia driver and re-installed them using the original Sony Drivers dated 2007. This did not fix the problem because upon installation, the computer would not log into windows. Right now I'm using the onboard graphics (even with those i randomly get light red vertical lines on the screen that appear and go away randomly) which has not caused my computer to crash.

I have searched around and apparently the Nvidia 8400 series had some manufacturing defects. Does anyone know of any fixes to this problem? Unfortunately I am outside of my warranty period (purchased January 2008) but I will try to contact Sony tomorrow to see if they can offer any support. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

Aashish

 

Hi, i have a FZ-38M (from Greece) T8100,GeForce8400M GT,4GB RAM.When i connect my Bravia 40V4000 through HDMI and select 1920X1080 and view only from MONITOR (HDMI) the desktop is like this.Can anyone tell me how can i fix it?
[img=http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/589/0010k.th.jpg]
[img=http://img128.imageshack.us/img128/7813/0011t.th.jpg]

 

Fix it ? You have to buy TV with full HD 1920X1080, your Bravia has lower then HD resolution probably 13xx something

 

It is Full HD my TV SONY KDL 40V4000 ( BRAVIA LCD Full HD 1080 40" (102cm) with BRAVIA ENGINE 2, 24p True Cinema and BRAVIA Sync).

 

Webbuzz, I also have Win 7 on my FZ4000 (build 7000 upgraded from vista) and FN keys worked fine, and also volume and brightness controls.. the only thing not working is the volume visual indicator (wich sometimes flicker on the screen so I suppose it is working, but the new graphic improvements of 7 are probabli messing up with it). This doesn't work even if you install nvidia drivers dated 2009 from windows update...

Anyways, had you any luck getting those FN to work?

 

Not sure I understand your question. You say you got the FN keys to work, just not the onscreen display of volume. Right? Are you asking if someone got the onscreen display to work or the FN key?

By the way, did you get the onscreen diaplay of BRIGHTNESS to work?

Gary

 

Have you enabled the 1:1 pixel mapping option?

 

I swap cables from xbox and vaio and all seems to be good.The one cable is belkin and the other from microsoft.

 

My FN keys do work. But, onscreen display for SOUND does not. No worries though

 

What about on screen display of BRIGHTNESS?

Gary

 

hi everybody,
hi gary,

i managed to do my clean install of windows 7 7000 build on my vaio fz 140 eb.

its working good so far.

one very weird issue i have ,

in system info,windows detects core 2 duo t7100 as single core processor and single thread.

device manger identifies processor correctly.
task manager shows just one core.

weird things about performance are ,
windows media player runs with high cpu usage like always 40-50 % in playing simple mp3 files.

and apart from that i do have working volume keys and all and fn key for mute (one i use) does work.
screen brighness keys dont work.

help me in this weird issue.

i ran sony hardware test in recovery enviornment ,it does show no errors found.

i think this is windows 7 issue.

 

Did you load the chipset drivers when you installed the OS? This is odd.

Gary

 

Nope...Same thing

 

i did install intel chipset software for windows 7.
i have not updated the winsat.
windows gives my hard drive 2.9 rating over hard disk performance.
i will update the windows performance score again.
but the cpu still shows one core.

i guess re installation is in order.with intel sata ahci driver during installation only by load driver option.

 

Someone change standard Intel 4965 WIFI mini pci or 3945ABG to new Intel 5150 or 5350 card with WIMAX support? Did it possible? And what about antenns? 5350 - 3 antenns, 4965 - only 2 antenns

 

But intel 4965AGN has also 3 antenna

 

ohhh of course i am wrong - i mean 3945ABG have 2 antenna
sorry.
how i read here (another SZ topic) the third antenna installing in body laptop, not at display body

seems its working, nice

 

So I did an update a while ago and I dont remember what it was but I have lost the hibernate button on the drop down menu where you shut down or restart the laptop. I thought it might have been because it was obsolete but after a few of everyones posts they seem to still have it. I always use the sleep function instead. Is there some issue Im not seeing here and what is the difference between sleep and hibernate?

 

Sleep turns off power to most of the peripherals, lowers the power to the CPU and provides just enough to RAM to keep it's contents alive. Bottom line it consumes some power, albeit very low amounts. Restart is almost instantaneous.

Hibernate copies the entire contents of RAM to a file (hiberfil.sys) on the root of the C: drive. It then powers off everything, so it consumes no power at all. Restart is accomplished by reading the hiberfil.sys back into ram and resetting the processor, it is faster than a regular boot up.

You most likely lost the hiberfil.sys file when doing a disk cleanup. That is an option in the disk cleanup utility that is turned on by default. But it is easy to fix. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories then right click on "Command Prompt" and select "Run as Administrator". A command window will open up. Then type "powercfg -h on" (without the quotes). This will re-enable the hiberfil.sys file. You MIGHT have to reboot after this, I don't remember for sure.

Gary

 

wow I jsut tried it and it worked instanly. I almost thought nothing happened until I checked, thanks. Now If I could only find a Nvidia drive that will work with my bluray player. I was messing around and updating all the drivers with driver max and I had a feeling messing with the video drivers might do this. Oh well I guess Ill have to do a sys restore and reload all the drivers except that one, maybe.

 

Did you create the two DVD recovery set when you first got the machine? (If not you can still do so as long as the hidden recovery partition is still in tact.) With Vista running, you can put disk one in the drive and the autorun should bring up an application that will let you restore individual applications or drivers. You ought to be able to use that to get back to the factory installed video driver. I don't think that the fact that you have a newer non factory one now installed should stop you from being able to do this, but I have never tried it on a video driver. (I have done it with an audio driver though.)

Gary

 

I had successfully installed the Microsoft update Nvidia 179.67 driver in my FZ with Vista 32 bit mentioned in the thread below. You can try as well.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=367300

 

Hey Coolguy, how well is 179.67 working and did you need to modify it in any way?

 

It is working fine. You don't need any modded inf. If you use the "Have disk" method for driver update, then use the "nv_whql" inf. You can also use the Setup.exe in the driver package.