SZ650NC Pics and Review

First Impressions 8-7-07
It's cute.
It's bigger than I expected.
Vista first boot went on for 30 minutes. Finally I used task manager to kill the Sony task. Another 10 minutes and it was ready to use.
Vista is way bogged down with malware. Lots of junk.
Sony support says they will NOT send me a Vista disk, that I have to burn recovery disks. They will not support a clean install, only a reinstall from the burned recovery disks.
No latch on the lcd. This is the first time I've ever seen this, but maybe it's OK.
Keyboard is a little rattly, but is full sized and feels ok.

Seems like a pretty nice machine.

Plays a DVD pretty nicely and the screen has good viewing angles.

I loaded RealRlight (a RC flight simulator) and it runs just fine. Seems fairly smooth.

misses:
My three conversations with Sony support did not go well. They weren't very interested in helping, to downright rude and refusing to connect me to a supervisor. Can't say I'm impressed with their support.

No option for XP. You are out in the cold on this if you need XP. I am making some progress on installing XP, though am not finished yet.

Screen is bright and clear, but there's some pretty bad light leakage at the top and bottom.

It's surprisingly slow, 3dMark05 score of 2700 on XP, another user reports 2000 on Vista



Here's some pics.
The comparison pics are to the GF's HP TC4200 (A 12.1" 4:3). The SZ is same depth, and height at the hinge. It's thinner in the front and longer.

 

A few more pics

 

Could you take a picture of the AC adapter?

EDIT: Awesome, the new adapter looks really portable. Could we also get a few more pictures of the screen head on without all the glare?

 

yup, see above

 

looks like the big cousin of the TZ!

 

Theres no WWAN ANTENNAE? And very niceee

 

NO WWAN either

 

The SZ X50 have never had a WWAN antenna.

The laptop looks great. Has the touch pad always been black?

 

in the second set of pictures, it looks grey/silver.

 

what can u say about the battery life?

 

do you know of an app which will test it?

I mean, other than sitting here with a stopwatch...

 

Has the touchpad has remained the same color throughout the SZ series updates?

 

Isn't there something that says what % of the battery life is left? All you'd have to do is use it for 10 minutes surfing the web with a few applications open and see what % it goes down, and calculate the battery life from that number.

 

does it run hot? By hot I mean temperature.

 

That's about as accurate as backwards blindfolded darts

 

Why? Calculating battery life is extremely subjective anyway, b/c it largely depends on what you're doing. You could have a program lock up in the background, you could have background tasks running like System Idle Process or search indexing using a lot of power, etc. etc. A rough estimate on stamina mode would be nice.

 

Well, I can tell you this much, it's VERY slow to charge. I ran it down last night (until it hibernated.) Plugged it in this morning around 10am, it's almost 2pm now and it's still only 69% charged.


Looks like this will do the job, I'll run it for you tonight
Download V2.7 here http://batteryeater.com/download.html

Article describing the app here.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mobile/display/battery-eater.html

 

Using BatteryEaterPro, the SZ650 got 1:18 under a full load with the X3100 video chip (stamina mode)

For reference, the GF's HP TC4200 did 1:10 under the same conditions. We've always been pretty impressed with it's usable battery life which seems to be about 4 hours the way she uses it (surfing, mail word, some graphics tasks and tablet mode.)

In this mode the application appears to run the HD continuously, puts an openGL app up and works it hard and also pegs out the pcsr.

I'll recharge and redo the test under 'idle' settings.


I will say, that the TC is MUCH quieter under a full load. MUCH. The HP truely is silent, the SZ be workin and sounds like it.

 

what do these numbers mean?

 

(I assume) under 100% cpu load using the integrated video card, the sz650 lasted for 1 hr 18 min while running a very intensive program

 

1:18 is 1 hour and 18 minutes

Both were run at full load (disk, graphics, CPU and memory.) Another test will be conducted at Idle (should give us max and min runtime) I will also run the tests with the nVidia graphics chip active.

Also, I hadn't started tests on both machines at the same time, so the HP' recharging started about 20 minutes after the SZ's. The HP is fully charged and the SZ is only at 50%.

They are both 3 cell LiPo. The SZ is 5800mah, the HP is 4300mah. Meaning the SZ's battery is 25% larger capacity and achieved 10% more runtime but is taking more than twice as long to recharge.
The SZ's 6 hours recharge seems a bit ridiculous and is way longer than industry standard. Clearly not disclosed by Sony on the specifications. It'll be interesting to see if users with bloatware loaded Vista see any better recharge times - perhaps there's some Sony utility which controls charging, though I can't see how when it'll charge with the machine off too.

 

The battery life. That is, that it ran for 1 hour and 18 minutes. Keep in mind, however, that the program MonsterMaxx was using attempts to max out every capable function at the same time.

Normal use will never do that, so it can not be used as an example of the type of battery life you will get.

 

Has the premimum SZ touch pad remained the same color?

 

Have you gotten the chance to test it yet?

 

damnit, are you saying the Geforce 8400M GS they put in is a piece of poo?

 

how long can SZ last with normal usage? i hope it last more than 3 hours...

 

Test completed at Idle. Surprisingly both the HP and the SZ got the same runtime, 204minutes, that's 3:24.

This test was conducted at idle with power saving for the screen and HD turned off (so the lcd was lit and the hd powered up the whole time.) Of course, it's under no load, but with power management normally active and turning things down this should compensate for any loads put on the machine.
So, runtime should be about 3-3.5 hrs under normal use. This is good.

What's bad about the SZ is the 6 hour recharge. That's way worse than the industry standard. Thinkpads advertise recharge at 1.5hrs, Dells the same. The HP did it in 86 min. Why is the Sony so bad?
Is it possible that there's some utility to control the charger? Could one of you with an unmodified Vista OS repeat this test with BatterEater? If you let BE relaunch on startup and leave it active it will give you a charge graph too. Just look in the BE's folder, there will be a subfolder for the date of the test, in there will be a charge.gif so you don't need to time it.

 

It really depends on numerous factors.

• First and foremost: which model of SZ you get. I've been told that the faster processors in the new SZ6xx Santa Rosa chipset, for example, draw more power than the previous models.
• Similarly, the new graphics chips seem to require more juice, which would also mean less battery life.
• If your SZ has a 7200 rpm hard drive, that uses a little more power to spin up and maintain speed than the 5400 or 4200 rpm models.
• Vista may tend to suck more battery life than XP due to the increased OS overhead.
• If you have the laptop set to use the dedicated nVidia card rather than the integrated graphics chipset, it'll drain the battery faster.
• If your SZ has the LED backlighting, that'll save a little battery life compared to LCDs that don't.
• What brightness level you like to set on your LCD monitor has a big impact.
• If your WiFi radio is on, your battery will drain a little bit faster, even if you aren't on a wireless network.
• Likewise with the Bluetooth radio, even if you aren't currently using a bluetooth peripheral.
• Does your definition of "normal usage" include gaming? If so, you'll get a LOT less battery time. Does it include using the DVD drive? More juice.
• If "normal usage" for you is just using Office applications and/or web surfing, you'll get nearly twice as much battery time as playing a graphics-intensive game.

Et cetera.

Overall, though...the precise components and configuration settings of your SZ will make the most noticable difference in how long the battery will last.

That's one reason they can give a huge range like "Estimated Battery Life: 2.0-4.5 hrs (Standard Battery)" for the SZ430. You might note that the estimate for the SZ360 is a significantly higher 3.5-6.0 hrs, for many of the reasons I cited above.

 

I see that SZ650 is most heavy - 1,8 kg SZ650 vs 1,69 SZ450?
Is that correct?

 

Yes the weight has increased in the 600 series SZ models.

 

I see this at last moment before order SZ650
For this reason i order TZ150NN.

 

What was the brightness setting?
Also, I PMed someone with the preloaded Vista installed, he said it only took him 2hrs to go from 15% to 100% charged, and that he was using it while it was charging.

 

Running XP, no access to brightness controls (yet)

 

I think you can easily expect 4hrs out of it with brightness turned down to half.

 

I might just consider the SZ3. Theres a store I know that still stocks them, simply because people still want XP. A wise choice if all I want is longer battery life and lighter weight compared to the SZ600 series?

 

DTX, you seem like you know what you're doing, may I ask why you'd make a decision like that? What is so terrible about Vista that you can't use XP with VMware for a few months until they patch things up?

 

Look guys, nothing against VM ware, but the apps we are talking about are heavy hitters (Solidworks, Cosmos, Dynamic Designer, etc). If we get a crash the support call will go something like this

"What OS are you running, which drivers?"
"I'm running VMware and XP with the latest drivers and patches"
"OH, we can't support VM ware, that's your problem, reinstall XP natively and it'll work fine"

Regardless of if that's BS or not, that's how it will go.

Hell, half the time the ansewer is to uninstall the program and reinstall it, the other half it's reinstall the OS.

the only time you get real help (and even this is iffy) is if you can give them an exact recipe of how to reproduce the crash and they can reproduce it off your recipe.
All the rest of the tech support questions that are solvable you can answer for yourself from help files and the net - which is what I do.

 

But don't they have support for the beta versions of Solidworks for Vista? How long do you expect these programs to go without full featured versions on the Vista OS?

 

I think I've explained this before. In order to use a newer version you have to convert all your models. You can never use the previous version again. Stupid, but that's their way.
Solidworks is notorious for releasing buggy software with SP0 (First full release, Forget Betas)
Those of us who use SW make a living on it. When there's a show stopping bug (and there frequently is) you are dead in the water until they get around to fixing it (could be months.)
I remember one time I upgraded (and I'd waited until SP3 - 6 months into the release), suddenly couldn't print my project anymore (yea, major fukkin flaw.) It took them a week just to acknoledge it. I was dead in the water, production STOPPED. Eventually we worked around it by exporting the solid, importing it into another CAD package, redoing all the annotation and printing from that.

SW is on this lemming trail to have a new release every year regardless of the bugs. 2007SP0 was release with 2000 reported bugs that were unfixed at release time (yes, I said two thousand known bugs.)

I have no idea what this cost us, but you can bet it was at least 5 figures and pushed the release date back by more than a month.

After that I swore I'd never upgrade to a new version until the very last service pack was out.

I want NOTHING to do with SW for Vista for at least two years after release. That is, the last Service pack of at least the second full release.

SCREW SW BETAs. I wouldn't piss on the disks if they were on fire.

 

I dual boot XP and Vista on my system at the moment. To be fair, there is not alot of pain installing Vista on an Asus system simply because the drivers are not proprietary like Sonys. I installed Vista to see what the fuss was about regarding the new UI. While I have no problems using it so far, it is very slow compared to XP, even after tweaking it, like disabling system restore, indexing service, etc. Id love to use Vista on a full time basis, but the slowness really annoys me. My system gets a rating of 4.9 across all components, but the overall feel of the system is way slower than XP.

As for VMware, there is a speed reduction for using an OS inside another OS.

I feel the need... the need for speed

 

I'm thinking that ridiculous charge time has to do with that small power adapter. That adapter is much smaller than the one that came with my sz150p, and all other sony's for that matter. Maybe it doesnt put out as much current as that old, massive brick

 

The anytime upgrade disk finally arrived.

As soon as it's done with this recharge cycle I'm going to install XP clean again, then Vista, leaving the current XP installation to muck up with trys at installing drivers. Dual boot (tri-boot actually.)

 

Hi, I also recieved the SZ650 and decided to run a few benchmarks. I have not done a clean install, and have not unistalled any software loaded with the computer. I simply installed the benchmarks and closed Napster and SpySweeper in the tray.

Benchmarks taken on battery power, wifi off, Brightness at 2/6 and on speed mode. I had between 75-81 processes running when idle.

Super Pi = 1:03
PCMark05 = 4148
3DMark05 = 2001
HDTune = 34.9 MB/sec (see pic)

I then decided to update the NVIDIA drivers to the latest available.

PCMark05 = 4504
3DMark05 = 2191
Windows Experience Index = 3.5 (see pic)

General observations:

- Moreover, these tests and installation took 2 hours. Windows indicated 4:05 minutes of battery life at ~100%, then after 2 hours or so 43% left over and 1:57 minutes.
- Charge time for battery to go from 30% to 55% was 1 hour. Thus, we can estimate (roughly) 25% per hour, and therefore 4 hours to fully charge.
- The notebook was very quiet throughout all benchmarks, and stayed very cooled (comparing to my Fujitsu S6210).
- Average FPS in 3Dmark was about 8 fps
- DVD reading and writing was very quiet. However, it appears the disc tray for the DVD was not well designed and cannot be opened without touching the table (i.e. if you lay the laptop flat on the table and open the dvd drive completely, it will rest on the table as well).
- Got a weird message from PCMark05 saying that I only have 52MB (53MB with latest driver) of graphic memory (see pic)/.

Hope this helps some people. There is lots of bloatware, and hence I would hope these results to significantly improve with a clean install.

 

Well that sux, Vista does not give you the option of naming the install directory. It simply changes the XP windows directory name to windows.old

Poo

I did install XP#2 into a directory called XP so I'll have access to that, but my experimental one is dead.

I wonder what that means to the boot loader

 

Was surprised to see that somebody also owns a Fujitsu S6210 and is also buying a sz650nc. Then i just realized that you were the guy who helped me on the Fujitsu forum!

So, according to your opinion, other than the speed, is sz650nc a good upgrade from s6210 in terms of build quality? My order was placed last Friday and I am still waiting.

This is my first time experience on sony. To be honest, if not because my wife desperately wants a sony, I would not touch it.

 

No, the old, massive brick took way too long to charge the battery too, it's a poor Sony implementation. The other problems were: light leakage, weak Wi-Fi reception, "electric shock," spacebar that required a "shim," a crappy keyboard, plus, in my view, a very grainy screen that was hard on the eyes.

 

Guys,

This is a great thread. I am interested in it because I am debating purchasing the SZxxx or a Dell 1330m. Based on this review, the SZ doesn't sound too appealing? Would you agree with me? The battery life/charging time is way too long...what do you guys think about the two machines? Any thoughts would be appreciated...

 

The Sony is still better than the Dell, based on my own experience. The Dell feels and looks cheap. Very poor workmanship. The Sony also has niglets, but I like its sophisticated technologies, like graphics card switching, which the Dell doesn't have.

Pros and cons to both systems, but since I have to stare at the screen all the time, I would pick the Sony over the Dell. The M1330 screen is washed out.

 

Getting annoyed that Sony did not upgrade their VRAM to 128mb, since I intend to hook it up to a 24" which if I recall, requires 128mb. Blah, the M1330 has it, but as the last post indicates, build quality and craftsmanship is poor.

 

I am really pleased with my purchase, although there are a few things I dislike about the SZ650 up until now.

- First is the 64MB of Vram as opposed to 128 MB (such as on the M1330)
- Keyboard is somewhat loud when typing
- Lots of bloatware

Due to all the bloatware, Vista takes a long time to load and close. In fact, sometimes shutdown takes over 3 minutes. But I think this is really because of all the pre-installed junk. I'm also not mentioning that my screen has some light leakage and uneven lighting, but this will be repaired/exchanged shortly.

This is the only negative things I could think of; I really like the specs of the computer, and there really is no other good choice (I think...) for a 13.3 with discrete graphics (apart from the m1330 of course).