Picked up sz110-Ongoing review

I figure I'll talk about my sz the more I use it. I just got it so I didn't do much but buy ram for it and its charging now. But here are somethings I noticed.

I bought it from Best Buy.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...t&productCategoryId=cat15200&id=1134703552594

It states its the 256mb "virtual" video memory version, not the 128mb. But I can't seem to figure out where to look for that info.

Instructions is none exsistant. The strtup paper in the box just barely coves whats in the box. Not even how long to charge the battery.

The new memory adapter... Don't even know whats it used for as the memorystick/duo slot is built into the unit.

The charger is almost a full size charger. At least 30% larger than the s360 chrager I got. Kinda bummed about that.

The batteries are different than the "S" series. It fits. Dunno if it'll harm the unit, but it has less mAh than the new SZ battery. SZ has 400mAh more.

Battery area not has felt in it to keep the batter from wobbling.

The air blows out the back, and the charger hole is on the back and not on the side.

From the few times I had a chance to turn it on, no stuck pixels. BUT there is way more light leakage than my s360 I'll try to do a compairason(sp) when wife goes to bed. Maybe its my eyes trying to show faults.

Power button feels flimsy.

Keysboard- no comment yet. It works well enough for me for now.

Feels heavier than my s360. but about the same size.

It did get warm (didnt load any games, i'll do that later when wife goes to bed) when on. Was on the topleft of the keyboard(underside). Thats where the air vent is. Again, not enough to say if it'll get as hot as my s360.

I wonder if the new hardware control monitor will work on it?

I'll post more stuff as I find out.

If you guys want me to stop, just let me know.

 

Oh. Sony did the cheap thing (then again, maybe because it needed to for dual channel) and use two 512mb chips. Cost me an arm and a leg. $210+ for 2x1gig ram.

 

Wife asleep. Playing with the brightness. Overall its as bright as my s360, but that light leakage from the bottom is bad. I'm wondering if thats normal. its 2x as bad. Looks washed out too?
See attachment. sorry for big size

Running 3dmark05. Crashed. Anybody running with stock video drivers? getting worried now. Ok, second pass worked without crashing. With sony's stuff still on the computer, I hit 1889, and my s360 just did 1077
When reading details, its about 2-4fps better and cpu test was 100% better.
Hmm I need to install a game or I'm getting a bit worried.

 

OK, now i'm ticked. The cd player will read cds but will not read any of my dvds. From originals like Battle for middle earth II to my dvd backup of world of warcraft. Grrr. All I hear is it clicking.

 

Just wanted to respond to some of the things you said:

Battery: I heard that some people had success with taping a thin layer of felt themselves.

AC adapter: Yeah, too bad it's so big. I think the 120W Kensington universal fits and is smaller/lighter, but it costs like 100 bucks.

Memory Card: The ExpressCard adapter lets you read xD/SD/MMC/MS (full-size) cards. The builtin Memory Stick Duo slot only reads, well, Memory Stick Duos -- which aren't as popular as SD cards.

DVD drive: Hmm, interesting. I've had zero problems reading my (original) DVDs, and I was able to burn (and subsequently read) 2 out of 3 DVD-Rs.

 

Everything designed to read this seems to give erratic results. Some folks think they know exactly how much real and virtual memory there is, but I don't recall seeing anything I could take to the bank yet. Or even conclusive information that there ARE two video versions of the SZ (which would seem unlikely since everything else under the hood is identical).

Well, really what's required there? Plug & play! I'm pretty sure the system came with a full or near-full charge, so once that taskbar icon says 100%, waiting longer won't do anything since lithium ion doesn't trickle charge.

Yup, a dual channel memory system requires two identical modules... and if they're only including 1GB total system memory, they had no choice but to use two 512mb sticks. And yes, it WILL work with just one stick of memory installed, but not in dual channel mode... which means lower performance, which wouldn't be a smart thing for a manufacturer to do to a stock system.

I agree about the power brick though... this really is a brick. Are the Japanese getting the same adapter with their SZs? Surprised they would put up with something like that.

 

Looks like this one goes back tomorrow if I cant get the dvd player to work. Really sad about that. Maybe the next one will have a better screen? Or is that normal?

Oh another thing. It seems (no precise test here) that if I'm doing my wow update (dloading 300+mb with a type bittorrent) its enough to cause my netgear/modem/wirelessG to shutdown. the moment I went to a wired connection, it stopped rebooting. That was strange.

Oh the case does seem more flimsy than the s360, but I can live with that.

 

i guess thats what people were talking bout when they said it "bleeded" from the bottom. That kinda sucks especially when watching movies

 

Wow, that light bleed IS bad. The SZ110 that I had didn't display anywhere near that amount of light leakage. I would try to exchange it if I were you.

Javier

 

I didn't think it would be this bad. my s360 next to it, which has a little(and all lcd will have a little) is nothing compaired to this. Even my normal desktop looks washed out because of it.

Nuff dwelling. leaving now to get it replaced. Dear God, please let the return go fast and not take hours.

 

Ok new laptop. It's a SZ120p. Why? Because the friggin Best Buy sold 4 of the sz110 to a business last night. And all the Best Buys were out of stock of the SZ models. So since I paid in cash, they now will MAIL me a check in 4 weeks. Grr... So now I goto Compusa. They have the 120. $100 more. Why? The difference in the sz110 and sz120 is that the 120's come with XP Pro. Not worth the $100 but I needed it now. Well... yeah. That's the ticket.

So I have it home. It reads dvds. First thing I do is run the backup software. And it pops out my first dvd and says error and to toss it. Its starting over on another dvd. It's about 11% done. So no more comments on that.

Screen? Yeah still a piece of junk compaired to the s360 which I I'm selling. ****, I wish I could pull off the screens and swap them. I mean, the black on the s360 is like 25% darker. Anybody else (with a sz unit) has issues with light leakage being bad?

 

Well the burn went ok from there. So now I have a backup of the restore dvds.
Since this is a different model (by model # only) and from a different store, I dont think they would allow a swap for the light leakage. It seems even the display model had it. I'll try and use it for the week and see if it drives me bonkers. I would rather live with this than with a dead pixel.

 

Oh I notice out of the box it uses windows wireless. But theres a Intel icon on the bottom just trying to get me to click on it to use instead. should i?

 

Use the Intel utility. It's quite good and gives you all sorts of monitoring features (for instance live statistics on how many packets have been received at what speed). I'm quite amazed at how much is different from the Intel wireless utility I was using on my previous laptop...

 

I agree - the newest version of the Intel wireless utility is WAAAAYY better than the last one I had used. It was so useless I had reverted to using Windows to manage wireless...

Javier

 

starstreak i think you have a bad one. give the SZ another try. Mine seems flawless for an SZ.

 

Graph- so exchange it again because of light leakage? Man. I wonder if they will let me... I guess I'll need to load a dvd in to see if it bothers me. Once I'm playing a game, it looks ok. Just that after using the s360 right after, the color seems washed out..
I'm wondering if what I see is normal. Two different stores, two different models and a total of three units (store display) looked like it leaded light as bad as mine. Maybe I'm being too picky.

 

yeah if youre extremely unhappy. Mine probably has light leakage but i dont care to look and compare. the part with light leakage is on the task bar anyway. I

 

Hey how fast does your battery drain? On vaio optimal and just two bars down from max brightness, if I unplug a 100% charged battery, in about 5mins, I'm now down to 90% Within the first minute, it was down to like 98%

 

OK more gripes, it drains way faster than my s360. In standby for 2.5hours, I'm down to 88% and by 3mins on, its down to 82%. I don't care if Sony says thats normal. I say its not.

 

How much memory did your s360 have? On machines like the SZ that have 1GB+ of RAM, it makes more and more sense to use Hibernate, not Standby, because RAM consumes power.

Javier

 

The s360 had 1gig and the sz120 has 2gig. And my XPS2 has 1gig. Woah, I cant believe added more ram to this little machine than to my xps2.lol

 

OK getting close to the end of my review. Maybe more like a blog,huh? Anywasy, here's the 3dmark scores.
1.86GhzDuo,2gig ram,100gigHD, Units were left in optimized mode

nvidia
3dmark03=4189
3dmark05=1887
3dmark06=791

intel
3dmark03=1461
3dmark05=533
3dmark06=137

My s360 before I sold it
3dmark05=1111

My cons so far:
1) Light Leakage. I would've exspected better on a new notebook.
2) Keyboard. Its not thats its small. just feels different.
3) Battery life/indicator Seeing it drain from 100-90% in a few mins of nongaming seems fast, but I got around 2hrs of use.
4) Standby- sucks to high heaven.

 

no way that you got 2887 with 3DMark05, the highest ive seen is upper 1900, i think you meant 1887?

 

thanks. you are right.sorry.

 

When I owned a sz120 I did have a noticable amount of light leakage, maybe a little less than what you showed. After moving up to the premium model, there is almost none and the colors are soo much better. And I averaged around under 3hrs of battery life with the sz120, but you can tweak some things in vaio power management to get more juice.

 

Ok trying to figure out something else. The cpu throttles. its supposed to. whats the lowest Mhz does it goto? I noticed my Dell XPS 2.1 Pent M goes to 800Mhz, but my Sony Duo 1.86 goes to 1Ghz. Is that right?

 

I don't have an SZ yet, but my Acer 8204 throttles down to 1Ghz per core with Notebook Hardware Control set to "Dynamic". Same thing with the Acer 5672 I ended up returning in favor of the 8204.

 

I just tried powerdvd with its power saving feature for laptops. My battery from 100%-93% (in other words, by the time I turned on the laptop to stamina mode and got the dvd set to play, I was at 93%)
I got 2:30mins. LESS time than with the WinDVD that came with the Sony. Weird. AND since it dumps to harddrive, every few mins I get major lag as it spools up the dvd player. Not so good.

 

Repeat post, but it does belong in these areas.

Ok! I did this way this time.
100% power, booted into stamina mode with 5 out of 8 screen brightness, 45% volume with wifi switch set to off, nic port on off and 1394 on off, harddrive shut down set to 3mins, vaio set to ultimate battery and USB FIX without a/c power. 98% when I started movie. I watch King Kong. Made it to the end of the movie! 3 hours with 19% battery remaining. Btw, if I don't touch the laptop for 5 mins after closing the movie player, It still says I can get 1:04hr of life left. But take that with a grain of salt as I'm not doing anything on the laptop. For kicks, I turned on full brightness. 3 mins later of doing nothing, and it still says 58 mins! Oh turning on wifi DROPED the time by 9mins. So its a heavy drain. And doing outlook for a few mins droped it another 4mins for about 2mins of use. So take the time reading with salt again.

This was worth the upgrade! Woohoo! Unlike the Apple, I can sit the unit on my lap with hardly any heat! I'll give apple one point, the blacks are still darker.

Man, after going through 5 laptops and doing mini reviews, I deserve 100+ rep power. lol

 

I'm glad you're enjoying the new machine! It's nice to see that you can actually experience what we were trying to describe to you about the screen brightness and corresponding battery life... It's so hard to put something like that into words, but I think we said it good enough to get you to upgrade Trust me, you won't regret it. I went the same path you did and have not thought twice about it since!

Javier

 

Same here !

 

thanks! About time I found something that matched what I needed.

 

OK, after using this for about 3 days, I found one gripe still left. **** battery drain when not using it. This is not always the case, but if I dont use the notebook for about 8+ hours from 100%, if I power it on, it will be down to 91% or less. Not in standby not in Hibernation, but off. The battery cannot hold a charge. Only thing I can do next is remove the battery and see if its the battery that sony is using. But I think all sony laptops have this issue to some exstent(sp). I need to find an extended battery and quit looking at the numbers.

 

Lol! I finally hit 7:15mins for battery.
I had Vaio optimization to ultimate, turned off everything I could with it, and set the screen brightness to 0. Dont run anything and now I hit Sony's magic number of 7 hours.
BUT I load MS works and for a bit it droped to 5:30. Then I didn't us it but kept it open in a minimized window. And battery would goto 6:00. Just keeping a program open wouldnt go back to 7 hours.
I moved my mouse around and pressed the start button etc and haha. 5:30min. I really love how Sony grabbed the longest time. If car manufactures did gas milage that way, all cars would have 80mpg+ becuase they would test the car idling. haha

 

Haha, that's why they call it hybrid A manual hybrid that is. Op, did you use intel or the nvidia card when testing these numbers. Kinda confused by the posts because you didn't tell us which setting did you use.

Is your SZ has problem with the spacebar too?

 

It was set to stamina mode.