How reliable is your Vaio Z11?

Today, I decided to do something daring: I decided to run, for only the second time, the laptop on battery What makes it more exciting is that it's also the first time it's connected to a projector (also external screen), via the VGA port.

And Windows 7 promptly BSOD-ed. I looked around for the crash log and read about a system-wide measure / summary of reliability. Under "Start" > "Search programs and files", type "reliability". You should see "View reliability history". I clicked on it and I see the graph below:



"Reliability" is measured on a scale from 1 to 10. I am quite surprised to find that my laptop's reliability has never risen far above a 5. Clicking on some of the reports, I'm also surprised to learn of issues I never knew existed. For instance:

1. BtStackServer.exe stopped working 3 times in the past 3 weeks.
2. PowerManager.exe, ThirdPartyAppMgr.exe, ThirdPartyAppMgr and PowerManager all crashed at the same time.
3. Internet Explorer stopped working 5 times, more than I thought (at most once or twice).

The single time my video driver died and restarted also appeared. Clicking on 'view technical details' gives this:



So my question is: does anyone actively look at your system messages and fix the issues (even if it's to shut unnecessary services down, such as BtStackServer)? Are there errors that you find surprising? Has anyone with video crashes used the debugging info given in the screen above to solve the issue? Thanks...

 

Mine's been better than yours. I've had a couple of program crashes this week but that's it. Observe:

 

Here's mine. I have plenty of errors

 

When i normally work, the screen turn black and cpu fan power up.I Can't do anything else except hold power button to force shutdown. When power up again you'll get very quick BSOD, then restart, follow by checkdisk. After that everything seem to normal.

This happen to me 2 times from last week and it's didn't include in reliability monitor.

 

Disable the automatic restart at BSOD in the control center (advanced system options iirc), note the stated error code and see what google tells you (or just post it here).

 

What does this have to do with the Z11?

Reliability report was a new thing for me, and I'm so far only experiencing flaws the first few days, installing, testing, tweaking. Last 3 weeks - nothing. Only information.

 

I've been wondering about the accuracy of the score. Right now I'm thinking it's sort of similar to the WEI: even though it may not be 100% accurate, Microsoft must have calibrated enough so that the broad strokes are right. In other words, since I've been getting scores from 1-5, I can pretty much conclude that my machine's stability is below average.

So it is indeed possible to get a good score. It looks like it uses a moving average, which is to be expected I suppose.

What are the main sources of errors? Are those applications or Sony-specific drivers?

Yeah it does look like the logging can only be done when Windows is up and running (fully), which limits its accuracy. Did you see any events at all? When I had to hard-reset my Z, it detected that Windows shutdown unexpectedly. But no further troubleshooting info

Looking at the reports of 1080 HD video issues, nvidia drivers restarting, etc., I'm wondering about the impact of Sony drivers on the system. It could very well be that it's the problem with nvidia drivers and not Sony, but, I'm interested to know how Sony's software does compared to the norm.

I'm assuming that the monitor is properly calibrated against a wide range of hardware and applications. Which probably means I should try harder to pull up my Z's socks...

Maybe I should also post this in the Windows 7 forum, I hope this does not count as cross-forum posting...

 

@TofuTurkey

I'm going to say 70% of my errors were induced by Sony specific graphics drivers. These crashes happened during video playback using the 330m.

The other 30% of errors were application errors. Mostly either from game freezes to Firefox freezes.

 

Hmm, I was looking through the IE problems and the report says Adobe Flash crashed (maybe Steve was right after all). It also recommended uninstalling and reinstalling Flash, and provided links in both cases. I'll see if it helps.

When Firefox freezes, does it recognize which component causes issues? It would be great if there's a channel to feed graphics driver failure info back to Sony...