Sony VPC-Z11 - Frequently Asked Questions

TPM also works with EFS encryption (of disks, folders or individual files, even files stored on OTHER computers, which can be pretty darn useful if you use a common network share), as well as with authentication packages like the fingerprint reader software.
For EFS, I believe you need a non-home/starter version of Windows, i.e. anything from Professional and up.

 

Great thread. It assures me that I basically don't need to do anything to my Z for my needs and to wait for some of the drivers mentioned that may be coming.

 

How big is the touchpad,can anyone measure its demension for me.

 

it's approximately 4cm (width) by 8.5cm (length) without the buttons. the buttons are about 1 cm in width.

 

Damn, that isnt big enough, anyway is the toughpad comfortable to use

 

It's actually fairly big for a notebook of this size. The one on my Asus 1000h is even smaller and i can work fine with that.
But i guess that depends on what you usually work with >_>.

 

Im kinda used with my Envy touchpad ( still dreaming MBP touchpad lol ), I'm going to switch to this small beast soon. Just so fed up with HP

 

Hi, I've been searching for information about the brightness of the Full HD screen. Is it usable outdoors? Has anyone with a calibrator measured the brightness?

Could not find this info in any reviews or in the forums.

 

hi every one,
i'm using the vaio z11wn, which has a slot for the sim card. I would like to use a fone sim to use 3g on my lap. is it possible?
if any one has done this, plz share soft, steps to produce this function.
thx alot

 

To OP:

I notice a number of fellow forumites who have the previous generation of VAIO Z (VGN prefix + Z11xx) are asking for help here. Might be the title of this thread needs to be changed to the new Z (eg. VPC-Z1xxxx/xx) to reflect the content.

TIA

 

Don't think users can change titles. We'd need an Mod

 

Already tried that - no answer within a week yet. Same applies for sticky request.

 

Not sure what the deal is with stickies. If I see another "can I replace the SSD" thread, my head will explode

 

in some posts, i see people said that the 3g is an option card, but the advertise for z11wn, the 3g card is integrated.
how to check my lap has this wwan card or not?
thx in adv!

 

Which Z model you have? The new Z has a option card.

 

thx for rep. i'm using z11wn, which is advertised on most website that has build-in or integrated wwan card (HSDPA)

 

Whats the difference between " 13.1" wide (WXGA++: 1600 x 900) ; VAIO Display Premium, LED backlight" and " 13.1" wide (FullHD: 1920 x 1080) ; VAIO Display Premium, LED backlight, Adobe RGB 96% coverage"

. Beside the resolution do both screens still have the same brightness and contrast ?

 

This is the first i'm reading about the change of title request. I don't think this thread needs to be made a sticky but i'll put it to the other mods. It is linked to in the list of helpful threads at the top of the forum. It is also linked to in the first post of the Z11 owners thread.

 

Thanks for updating the title. I obviously contacted the wrong person before
I'm okay with the thread not beeing sticky, as long as it is ensured that it can be found (an above all *is* found).

 

The forum software changed last week and some mods had limited permissions to edit in some forums but it has gone back to normal now.

 

Is there any info on the i-540 vs i-520 for real life usage?

Also, any comparison of those to with the i7-620. I want to know real-life comparisons, benchmark scores etc are nice but I'm not willing to pay considerable amounts more just for a higher Windows Index score.... I'm considering a Z with 520 for about ~1350 (with bing cash back and $300 trade in).

 

It depends on your real-life. When doing just some office work you will hardly notice any difference. The more CPU intensive applications you run (some games, video/audio processing, ...) the more you will benefit from the 540. In my humble opinion you get the best value for your money with the 540; and as there is still a shortage of 620s they will force you to buy the 540 (in form of a free upgrade from 520 as here in europe for example).

 

Guys, can I run CCleaner on Sony vaio Z SSD? Is it safe to use it? or better dont? I am afriad it might hurt the SSD.

 

Not sure why you are concerned, but CCleaner is perfectly safe. It works fine and I use it often.

I don't use the wipe feature, but that shouldn't be a problem either.

 

How are you going to get the Z with a 520 for $1350? What site via Bing cashback? Thanks!

 

HELP!

Please see the below YouTube, the video will show you the new Vaio VPCZ1 without light sensor cover:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN3ACR70&feature=related

Please see the below YouTube, the video will show you the new Vaio VPCZ1 with light sensor cover:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1WwE8LQEBQ&feature=related

well …..I just find out that I am one of those people who got this notebook without sensor cover………….
is it matter the sensor cover?

 

Another alternative is to use "GOO GONE" to remove the adhesive residue. I have used it on several notebooks and it does not damage the finish.

 

Anyone noticed that the bottom and right portion of the VPC-Z11's Touchpad is completely irresponsive to touch or dragging? This is most evident if you launch the "MoodPad" accessory from the "Synaptics Pointing Device" tray -- there is a whole strip at the right and bottom parts that one could never paint onto. The left and top edges are behaving fine.

I could confirm that this is not a hardware problem because if I uninstall the Touchpad driver that comes with the Vaio and install the latest (generic) driver from Synaptics then the right and bottom edges become responsive and usable immediately, in fact a bit TOO responsive, you will have to try it to understand what I meant. But that at least makes the one-touch scrolling much usable. (IMO the synaptics' version is also better in terms of the gestural functions than the Sony modified version).

Does anyone know of a way to balance/calibrate the touchpad so that the left/right top/bottom parts behave more symmetrically?

If this issue has been discussed before (perhaps in another thread) please forgive and pointers to the relevant threads are much appreciated.

 

Just tried this out, but i don't have this issue, although i installed a newer Synaptics driver (15.x.x something). Can use all of my touchpad even near the edges (and with every double tap, two finger scroll etc.)

 

Yes, as I have said in my post, the entire touchpad becomes (sort of) responsive after the installation of the generic driver. However, the mapping is still not quite right. Sorry that I didn't made it very clear in my first post because I expected most users to be using the original sony driver. Here are two pictures illustrating the problems (**NOTE** these are AFTER installing the generic synaptics driver):

The above shows the driver interpreted absolute touch position (using the EdgeMotion Regions control in Synaptics TouchPad Properties) when the finger is still >10mm from the right edge. The cross-hair (kind of) cursors/markers of the edge-motion region control are already reaching the right margin. Moving the finger further right could still move the cursors/markers but the x-position value would (expectedly) not go beyond the maximum value and remain at the right margin.
(Additional info: With the original driver that came with the VPC-Z11, the cross-hair could never reach the right-margin. That means the internal x-position value is limited to some ~90% of the x-range. But the generic driver falls short from the other end as shown below.)


The behavior at the left side is very different. The internal x-position could never reach zero (the left-margin), even with the finger pushing all the way to the left-edge of the touchpad. (Additional info: The sony supplied driver could reach zero (i.e. the left-margin) no problem.)

So my conclusion is that the touchpad drivers' internal mapping is wrong. The sony modified one and the synaptics one are wrong in different ways. The sony engineers perhaps tried to fix the bug with the synaptics driver pos values never going down to 0 and shifted the coordinate system (without properly scaling it) and that made things worse (one-finger scrolling becomes rather unusable.)

I hope one of them would release a fixed driver soon. In the mean time it is kind of tolerable with the generic driver installed.

 

Does partitioning my 256 SSD ( 64GbX4 RAID0 ) will affect its performance ?

I would like to make a 20Gb partition for Ubuntu 10.04 the rest for windows 7.

Thanks.

 

No. Partition away.

 

Thank you.

 

Does dropping refresh rate to 40 help increasing battery life ? And I heard human eyes can't detect anything above 30hz , so I won't notice any difference right ?

 

It has been shown by the kind people on this forum that there is some sort of garbage collection on the SSDs installed in Z. However, I think all this was done on windows.

My question is :
Do we know if the garbage collector on Z is OS dependent ? Will it work under say ubuntu for example ? Is there a way to find out ?

I do not have the Z yet but I am thinking of getting one. Any help is appreciated.

 

Yes it does - and you won't notice any differences in most situations. Just try!

 

As the Z RAID controller drivers do not support TRIM there is no possibility for Windows to do some kind of garbage collection; everything is done by the drives themselves and so it is OS independent.

 

I recalled idle time garbage collection is OS dependent (ie. NTFS only).

The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

 

But this is not the case for the drives used in the Z, is it?
(In addition, NTFS-based garbage collection won't work with RAIDed drives at all).

 

Why doesn't GC that looks at NTFS $bitmap work with RAIDed drives?

 

If I remember correctly the $BitMap contains a list of free clusters, which are just a bunch of sectors. So if a disk wants to know which sectors can be deleted it
- has to know at first the bitmap itself, which might be distributed over several disks and the part that is stored on the actual disk might contain data for clusters on another disk
- has to know where the bitmap is stored - it is stored at a fixed volume offset, but the drive does not know which part of the MFT it has
- has to know how the RAID controller distributes the sectors over the entire RAID, because the entries in the bitmap are cluster numbers of the 'whole RAID' (as it is seen as one disk to the operating system), not just the sector numbers of the actual disk

Assuming this three (i think the are a few more) basic conditions I find it rather hard to implement a reliable (!) file-system-aware garbage collection.

But I have no problem getting disabused

 

Thanks for the info pmfcmmak.

Interesting read General Discussion How's GC gonna work for RAID?

 

Would be nice if we put these all in the first post.

 

...or if people read this thread at all
...or if the Mods make it sticky (outrageous recommendation, I know)

 

Except for RAID 1.

 

where do you come up with those ideas.......pretty risky stuff

 

Mirroring of course would enable filesystem-aware garbage collection, but I still think NTFS-based GC is more like a workaround than a reasonable system.

 

Seeing that nobody has seen a marked decrease in overall speed over time, I think whatever GC is happening works fine.

That said, TRIM-through-RAID is still the high water mark. We will have to wait for Intel to release an update past RST 9.6. The erroneous note in the 9.6's help file would indicate they are at least thinking about it.

 

For some reason, I don't see Bluetooth in my Device Manager. The Z11 does have Bluetooth right?

 

Yes it does. Did you enable it from VAIO smart network?