Got my SR290 :) , and some questions

yay; ordered this last week. It said it would ship 12.16, and I was like okay, gotta wait until then, but they were quick and shipped it yesterday and came today. I like it a lot so far. Screen is perfect (compared to the old Lenovo I ordered and didn't like so passed it onto my uncle), doesn't seem to have any dead pixels at the moment. It's light, too.

But I have a few questions, below, for now.

1. Is there a 'quiet' mode I can set on the laptop? So if I turn it on, it'll be quiet, and then after I use it a little bit, the fan starts turning on at low speed, but then that fan keeps spinning and it won't stop ever. Not sure what to do about that. I changed the power plan to Power Saver; it seems to make it stay quiet for a longer time, but then eventually the fan kicks in and keeps going.

2. Quick check of battery life gave me 2hr 40min; is that abnormally low? I plugged it into the charger, left it off, and went off for a few hours, and came back. I thought it was 3.5hr. This is with P8600 and the ATI GPU.

Thanks!
- Eli

 

1. Set Vaio Control center to Silent.

2. Set Vaio Control center to maximum battery, set Vista to energy saving.

To further increase battery life consider dimming brightness, turning off bluetooth and webcam, disabling vista services like indexing and superfetch, uninstall bloatware, use undervolting and a clean install.

 

Thanks; I didn't know there was a Vaio Control Center. I changed it to silent, but, once the fan spins up, it still keeps going. I'm wondering if anyone else has a similar problem, but I'm going to call Sony to see if this is normal behavior.

I have done the cleaning process for Vista, just not a clean install. Disabled most unnecessary objects, but still, battery has not changed at all. So I might have to do a whole battery to try this.

What's the process to do a dual-boot with Vista on a Sony laptop? I can load XP fine, but then I need the original Vista disc to get its boot menu, which I don't have, except for the recovery discs.

 

I experienced the fan problem with my 210SR before too. It dosn't stop spinning. It was actually quite noticeable, if I was in my room and no other noise. But when im in class, it is not noticable. Second, I think it is natural for vista to miscalculate the battery life, it happened all the time. Before it would say 2 hours, but it would last 4 hours. I think the AGP dedicated card would be around 3 hours battery life, which is very good, considering the hardware specs it has. The 3.5 hours is when you tweak your laptop a bit.