Another 2010 Z11 owner, and my problems

Howdy,

My new Vaio Z ("VPCZ1" according to the text in the bottom-right corner of the lid) has the 1920x1080 display and I opted for the 500GB/7200rpm HDD "V" option rather than the SSD/DVD "X" option because it was £350 cheaper and I preferred capacity to speed, I've also read that high-capacity SSDs use more power than HDDs. I never used the optical drive on my last laptop and it's been no loss at all (except for having to manually get rid of the "Make recovery discs" nag messages). I also read the the Core i7 uses more power than the i5, so I went for the i5 540 and the 9-cell battery. In my last outing I got a good 6 hours continuous usage out of it, I can probably squeeze an extra hour or two after figuring out how to minimize power usage.

Anyway, I've only had it since Tuesday but I've already run into a series of problems:

When I first got my laptop, I was busy uninstalling the shovelware that Sony put on it. They didn't have a "Clean start" option when I bought mine online. I uninstalled the "Vaio Event Service", not fully knowing what it was used for. Whoops, there go my Fn keys, keyboard backlight, and graphics switch. I reinstalled it but the graphics switch still didn't work (and the LEDs were off too). After living with the Intel GMA for a couple of days I decided to run the Recovery wizard and start again.

Second time round everything was fine, but then seemingly randomly the graphics switch stopped working about the same time I joined my laptop to my Active Directory domain. It was a Friday evening and Sony's telephone support wouldn't be open until next Tuesday. I went through Recovery again.

This time I made a track of every system change I made, hoping to find out what caused the Switch to stop working. Some how the mere act of caution stopped anything bad from happening. It's now been 4 days since I Recovered and everything's fine.

Well, almost everything.

Today I was watching a flash video (this one: Twouble with Twitters // Current ) in full-screen. About half-way through the video my laptop locked up and froze. I had to depress the power button to force a power cycle. Playing the video again in full-screen caused another lockup. The system is fine playing it within the browser. I did some googling and apparently system crashes and freezes caused by full-screen flash video is a fairly common occurence. People all recommend upgrading video drivers and video BIOS firmware, unfortunately NVidia don't allow Sony Z users to upgrade their drivers, presumably because of the Hybrid graphics system. My drivers were last updated in January which feels strange to me, because I always keep my desktop's drivers up to date.

Another minor problem relates to the display. I can often notice a diagonal "refresh pattern" appearing when I scan my eyes across the display. I recognise this is probably something inherent in how the display works, I noticed something similar in my last laptop. It isn't ordinarily a huge distraction, but certain videos bring out the effect more than others).

Another display issue seems to be electrical interference patterns emerging which I also noticed on my last laptop (which was a 120dpi Tecra M4 with a 1400x1050 display). If you open up a Paint window and fill it with a solid color (e.g. blue) and open up Task Manager right next to it (open on the Performance tab) then you'll see interference patterns appearing in the solid color. Again, this isn't a serious issue for me.

Finally, the screen isn't too good at displaying neutral greys, they're shifted towards a cooler color temperature (i.e. pure greys have a yellow tinge). I do a fair bit of Photoshopping on my laptop and I was wondering if anyone knew a way to change the temperature of the display without resorting to software solutions (i.e. Adobe Gamma).

I note that my laptop has four free SATA connectors inside (or so the BIOS setup screen tells me). Is there any way I can expose these as eSATA connectors? Would I have to drill an adapter hole into the optical drive cover? Or can I fit an optical drive into my computer in future if I wished?

I'm also looking at getting the docking station, but I'm disappointed it doesn't have an audio connector, you'd have to plug speakers into the laptop or use a USB sound card.