Things to do when getting your Vaio S

I saw a few topics on here of excellent suggestions to do when getting a Vaio S but can no longer find them all. I'll make a partial list of some things I found but let me know of anything else you can suggest. I'll update this main thread with your input so that this can be a one stop place for new Vaio S owners.

- Uninstall the stock Dolby sound drivers and install the ones from Asus. This should result in better and louder sound. Read about it here.

- Remove certain bloatware: Vaio Gate, Vaio Location Utility, Vaio Content Folder Watcher (Vcfw.exe), Vaio Listener
Keep Vaio Control Center, Vaio Smart Network, Vaio Hardware Diagnostics and Vaio CPU Fan Diagnostics.

- Turn off your bluetooth to improve battery in the VAIO smart network. You can turn it on again when you need it.

- Right-clicking on the Desktop lags slightly. Install the registry fix

- Overclock your GPU. This has been known to increase gaming performance by a lot and being very safe to do. Also will not decrease battery life. Read about it here.

- Add extra RAM if you feel the need, which is very easy to do. Tutorial

 

First of all, I would not suggest to uninstall Vaio update. Secondly, you should make a line break before the list of software to KEEP and perhaps make the "Keep" caps and bold, so no one accidently uninstalls Control Center not knowing what he or she is doing.
To further enhance your list:

- for any question regarding either Vaio S 13 oder 15, search the Vaio S 2012 Owner's Thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/son...fficial-2012-sony-s-series-owners-thread.html

- for GPU overclocking (which is done via BIOS mod), this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/677079-sony-vaio-s-bios-mod-gt640m-le.html
EDIT: This will most likely not affect battery life because voltages stay the same and high clocks are only used when needed. Perhaps you can feel a small difference when gaming on battery. In future there might be mods with adjusted voltages for even higher clocks. Those will likely result in lower battery life.

- install a SSD if you don't already have one and want blinding speed (I strongly recommend Samsung 830) and clone your this way: http://forum.notebookreview.com/son...y-s-series-owners-thread-341.html#post8766536

- tune your SSD in Windows 7 (can't find an english source link, just google for SSD optimization oder SSD tuning) and use the Samsung SSD Magician software if you have a Samsung SSD. You can get your Vaio to cold boot times of 10 seconds!

- peel of the pesky stickers to make your notebook much more beautiful

- install ultimate windows tweaker (google for newest version) to further enhance Windows' performance and customization options

 

Instead of cloning and tweaking for SSD afterwards, you better start with clean installation on SSD. This way Windows 7 itself sets already tons of SSD settings (like disabling defragging etc).
Many tweaking suggestions are based from the beginning time of SSD, and shouldn't actually be done anymore (or are not required). One example is about wearing level.. since the first SSD did have a lower amount of over-writes cycles, they suggested to put e.g. temps / pagefile / etc on another disk. Nowadays the SSD's have much higher re-write cycles number so just use it as if it a HDD on steriods. I've seen this recommendations more and more.

I did a clean install (with Samsung 830 SSD) and without any optimization and booting within 10 seconds.

 

Yeah you're right, clean install should also be recommended and I should have mentioned that. Cloning has its advantages though, because can keep your recovery partition if you want and you don't have to mess with recovering of software that came preinstalled or with the right order of installing sony specific drivers etc.

Both ways are viable options imho.

 

- Replace ODD with caddy bay for extra storage. Read more about it here.

Battery life will slightly decrease and a bit increasily weight, but its benefication totally worth it

//Edit: anyone try modding BIOS for HD6630M?

 

Good suggestions.
Here's more:

- Enable middleclick on the touchpad by 3 finger click. To to this, open regedit, click on HKEY_CURRENT_USER then on the menu Edit > Search and search for 3FingerPressButtonAction and double click on it. Change the value to 4 and restart your computer. You will then be able to press the touchpad with 3 fingers to do a "middle click" as clicking on the wheel on a mouse.

-If you are on Firefox, try these 2 addons to speed up your browsing. They go really well with the touchpad:
- Back to close: When you are on a tab, three-finger right-to-left swipe will close the tab if there's no more back history. Remove the toolbar icon by preferences. This will allow you to open a new tab, read it, then 3 finger swipe to go back to the page you were previously on.

- Space Next When browsing any forums, google searches, blogs, and many others, you can keep your hands near the touch-pad by pressing space to go to the next page. Really handy that you no longer have to move the cursor onto a tiny button to go the the next page. You'll be able to keep your hands on the touch pad.

 

Thanks, penubag. That tip on enabling middle click through the registry has been working wonders for me. +rep

I noticed too that there was an option for two-finger clicking. Do you have any idea which value I need to set it to for a right-click?

 

setting it to 2 is for right-click, however I can't get it to work for the 2FingerPresBUttonAction.