Custom AR51J

SONY VGN-AR51J Custom
I bought this computer 2nd hand a while back for around £200. I was delighted with it, but it soon became apparent there were some serious but fixable flaws. First of all there was Vista. That went out, Windows 7 Ultimate came in.

Then there was the spindle drive, 4200rpm on an otherwise well specced machine seemed short-sighted and a true bottle neck. So that went into service as storage in the second slot, and an SSD was put to use.
Ram was maxed to 4 gigs, and the machine now was running at somewhere very near to potential.

I then saw this. I waited a bit for the best price on ebay and got a T9300 chip for around £50. This is the best value chip for the native bus speed of 800mhz, there is another, the T9500, which runs at 2.6mhz, but it’s seems to be exactly the same architecture. Just a lot more money for the extra 100mhz. Installation was very easy, and as a bonus I was able to boost my girlfriend’s NR180e with the T7250 I took out. I got two Vaios upgraded for fifty quid. Result.

While installing the processor, I gave the cooling a look over, cleaned the fan and grill, used a decent thermal paste on the CPU and GPU and the machine was running considerably cooler.

So I then looked into getting the most out of the graphics. I played with Rivatuner for a bit, and got it running at a decent lick. 671mhz core clock, 1350mhz shader clock and memory clock at 900mhz.
This is my WEI now.  (pic link)

After putting a USB 3 card into the otherwise dormant express card slot, the machine was brought as close to a modern level as I currently find possible and economically viable!

The only frustration now is I have a WUXGA screen I would like to use, but when I install it, it just through a factory test cycle. Other machines in the AR range have WUXGA and the GPU is definitely capable so that’s a little annoying. I’m think it may be the cable (wuxga cable has more data contacts than WXGA I think) , but would welcome any thoughts.
Here is a collation of Windows 7 tweaks and fixes specific to this machine. I take no credit for any of them, just pooled them together.
Upgraded the Graphics drivers to the very latest

2.9.551 . Here is the fix for getting them to install (Sony has tried to lock out Graphics card driver upgrades) Unpack the drivers to the C: core and go to C:\295.51-notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-international-beta\Display.Driver. In here are several inf files. Open nvac.inf and insert “%NVIDIA_DEV.0426.9061.104D% = Section004, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_9016104D” into the section titled [NVIDIA_SetA_Devices.NTamd64.6.1]. Under the section called [Strings] paste NVIDIA_DEV.0426.9061.104D = "NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT" between the 8600M GS and the 8400M GS entries. Not quite done yet, the older drivers had just one inf to patch but this set seem to cross refer to one another so save nvac.inf and open nvam.inf. Insert the same two lines in the same sections, save nvam.inf. The drivers should now install. The nvidia control panel has many tweaks and option, but one thing that was interesting was the ability to set custom resolutions. I tried mine at 1920x1200 and it replicates it nicely on the WXGA screen!


Got the FN buttons working properly!
Grab the AR5 Utilities and unpack them. Grab the SFEP version 8.0_09Q2_S_8.0.0.1 (the native one didn’t work for me)
Do this: In this order, Open the 'Device Manager': click on 'Start', right click on 'Computer', select 'Manage', select 'Device Manager'.

In the 'Other Devices' section, right click on 'Unknown device' in the list, select 'Update Driver Software', select 'Browse my computer for driver software', browse to your 'SFEP DRIVER' installation file folder, click 'OK', then click 'Next' and let Windows update the driver, then reboot.

From your 'Sony Shared Library' folder, run 'setup.exe' to install, then let Windows reboot.

From your 'Setting Utility Series' folder, run 'setup.exe' to install, then reboot.

From your 'VAIO Event Service' folder, run 'setup.exe' to install, then reboot.

From your 'VAIO Control Center' folder and run 'setup.exe' to install, then reboot.

Your Eject, Mute, Fn Keys should now be working correctly and you can use the 'Vaio Control Center' application to assign functions to the S1 and S2 keys after doing this:

The file in C:\ProgramData\Sony Corporation\Setting Utility Series\SBCurrentSettingData.xml is written by the Vaio Control center software, it contains your machine ID, in my case 19000.

In C:\ProgramData\Sony Corporation\Setting Utility Series\MConfig there are different files showing different machine number as a file name, I took the M19763 file (it looks like it has the 2 S1 and S2 keys) and renamed it M19000 (according to my machine number).
: In C:\ProgramData\Sony Corporation\VAIO Control Center\Config\ there are 2 files : ModelConfigSUS and ModelConfigVCC, for both of them I change each value inside the xml files from 19763 to 19000 (my machine ID).

After restart S1 and S2 appear in the Vaio control centre where you can change the application each button programs. I have media player with “/playlist All” in the option box on S1, and a screensaver on S2.

Rebooting each time is a pain but doesn’t seem to work otherwise. With the SSD it is no biggy though

Maximised the space on my SSD.
As most here are all too aware, there are a lot of “just in case” folders in Windows 7. I am pleased they are there, but would rather they weren’t hogging my tiny 30gig Vertex’s space.


THE NEXT SECTION CAN ONLY BE VIEWED AS EXPERIMENTAL. MAKE A SYSTEM IMAGE BEFORE DOING THIS!

Make an installable windows 7 on a flash drive (you can do from on a DVD but this involves a lot of reboots, and flash is so much faster than an optical drive) Boot into recovery, select a command prompt and use these three lines to move unmovable system folders to your second drive and still let windows see them as present in the system drive. E is presumed as your second drive

Robocopy /copyall /mir /xj C:\blah\blah E:\blah\blah
Rmdir /s /q C:\blah\blah
Mklink /j :C\blah\blah E:\blah\blah

I moved my users folder (especially useful if seven decides to die, you have all your personal stuff elsewhere) and the following folders into E:\backup:
C:\Windows\assembly
C:\Windows\ehome
C:\Windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository
C:\Windows\globalization
C:\Windows\help
C:\Windows\installer
C:\Windows\microsoft.net
C:\programdata
C:\Windows\speech
C:\Windows\web
And yes!:
C:\Windows\winsxs

This gave me more than 8gigs back on a 30 gig drive. Not too shabby. Having said that I’d probably not bother on a bigger drive (like the 60 gig vertex 3 I will be putting in soon!)

AS I SAY THIS (APPEARS TO) WORK FOR ME, There is no discernible detrimental impact on performance, I have installs etc etc and everything seems stable, but there may be something waiting to bite me on the bum later. I cannot be responsible for any damage to any but my own machine. Please make a system image first, as if you scatter folders like this it is prohibitively difficult to do one afterwards. Windows update can fudge with this too, but I tend to only use that as a setup tool anyway, and get security updates through things like belarc advisor






The last few are cosmetics
Animated wallpaper
Go into My computer properties, advanced system settings, advanced, performace and turn off anything that says animate, fade or slide. This gives you back some processor time, and you should be able to animate the backdrop with no real impact on performance. (it turns off in the background of other fullscreen tasks anyway) Grab a copy of Dreamscene Seven and install it. Then right click on a wmv or mpg and select as desktop background.

Blue progressbar
Telly tubby green is a bit old. Grab this,follow the instructions and install. Much nicer. NB only use the UXCORE patch enclosed with blue progress bar. I used another and it hosed the services for my 3g mobile internet dongle irrevocably and I had to re image.

Blue folders
As above,beige folders are,well, beige. Blue is much nicer (IMHO). There are lots of reghacks and patches to customise folders but they are frankly hard work and don’t always act the way they should. So i grabbed a copy of Iconpackager and windows blue and now I have snazzy blue. You may have to pay a little, but it’s really worth it.

Remember, this is a custom machine. Which means I adapted it with me in mind, and you can cherry pick none, some, or all of it. I don’t guarantee any of it will work for you!

That’s about it. There are other things of course that are possible, like select all, copy to and move to in the context menu, but the changes above have made a difference of magnitude to an already competent machine. Sorry for the long first post. And thanks to all the clever contributors to this forum and elsewhere that enable us to make the most of our machines!