SR Problems

Im checking back in after not having been on these forums for over 2 months since I got my SR-190 back in August. Few problems have come up, if you have any advice how to fix them, i appreciate it alot.

1)Battery life stinks. (Ati-card) (I have tried lowest settings, DVD drive off, wifi/bluetooth off, screen lowest brightness) most I get is 2hr 45min. Anyone can tell me how to overclock or get more out of this machine?

2)If I take the battery out of the laptop, hook it to the a/c adaptor and then put the battery back in with no a/c adapter the laptop does not turn on. I needed it on a flight back to NY and it wouldn't turn on even with the battery fully charged to 100%. Its happened 4 times already. Im scared its the battery. Anyone have similar problems?

3)The screen/lid seems bent. if you look at it from straight above or when its closed it is slightly in a U shape. I can slide paper in btwn the screen and the screen holder. Is this normal or should I contact sony?

4)I have 2.4 ghz and 320GB with 4 GB Ram. And the machine is very slow. Anyone know how I can make it faster? Likewise Vista is giving me problems; for example Works doesn't do spell check cause it says there is an error.

I bought the SR thinking it was going to give me excellent performance, battery life, and be stylish. I wanted to wait for a new macbook but decided on the sony. Now that I am having so many problems I hate myself for not waiting. Hopefully I can fix some of these things so that I love my machine again.

 

1) What are you doing on your laptop? Most quoted battery life were obtained on low settings, not doing anything too intensive. Like, minor surfing, but also considerable amounts of time just leaving the laptop to run. Overclocking will make your battery life worse. What you want to look for is guides on undervolting to make your laptop's battery last longer.

2) If your battery is 100% and is taken out of the laptop, it shouldn't lose its charge at all. Have you replicated this? Charge to 100%, take it out, and then put it back in to see if it still works? I don't think anyone here has had that problem, so it may be a faulty battery if it is happening.

3) What's the screen holder? The bezel? I assume there's some space because you don't want the keys to hit the screen when you close the lid? Not sure. I haven't paid too close attention to this

4) Look up any of the clean install guides for Sony Vaios. The reason everything is slow is because Sony puts a whole ton of bloatware on their machines, which is an incredible pain.

 

1.) are you going by vista's battery life prediction?? there is a wrong battery life prediction problem with vista and it always shows 2:40 at most..
i have the ATI card too, and i can get 3 and a half hours or more out of it easily
you can get more battery life by undervolting the cpu... and doing the things i listed below

2.) i don't have that problem

3.) mine is like that too, but i think it's normal

4.) did you take off sony's bloatwares, shut off unnecessary vista components, turn off indexing, turn off automatic hdd defragmentation, shut off useless processes??

 

3.) I believe this might be similar to the ThinkPads and actually be a design feature and not a flaw.

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=19

But I could be wrong. Just a guess.

 

The battery reading is vista, i have the ati card as well and i regularly get over 3 hours, vista reads that for pretty much all laptops regardless of battery life.

The whole not turning on thing....thats odd, it doesnt happen to me, as long as i have the ac plugged or the battery in, it doesnt matter if i take one or the other out as long as power is going for the laptop to run/turn on/work...

The screen is not bent, read the forums....its a safety feature to protect the super thin screen from breaking...its quite flexiable...


Vista needs to be tuned, like an engine...kinda. Once you tweak it(turn off indexing, remove bloatware, run cc cleaner, deactivate crazy startup programs you didnt want opening) vista will run MUCH FASTER than XP. My computer with only 2gb of RAM and a 5400rpm HDD literally does things almost instantly, with the exception of booting up...which still takes like 45-50 seconds. Mines not that tuned, still got like 67-70 proccesses running, but vista comes with 88 before you install your own software!