Vaio S in Canada (Vancouver)

Hi Guys,

I'm heading off to Vancouver for a short break in late Feb and was hoping to take advantage of the great exchange rate (for brits anyway!) by picking up a Sony Vaio S with the Radeon 9700 in it.

My main problem is that I can't seem to find any shops which stock the S with the Radeon 9700 in it! Even the Sonystyle.ca website tells me they have none in stock. Do Canada just not have the Vaio S with the 9700 in it, or am I looking at the wrong places? One thing that has occured to me is that I may be able to buy one of the new 'S3' vaios which are coming out at the moment, since I'm lead to believe they have a radeon 9700 in them as standard. The only thing is that I don't know if they will have hit the shops by the time I am out there. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Or any suggestion of which shops to try in Vancouver. I have absolutely no ideas of who the big retailers are in Canada/Vancouver.

Thanks for your time!

 

The big computer retailer is futureshop.ca. Also try compusmart.com. Maybe they will order it in. Many a time models available in the US are not available in Canada (and rarely v.v. such as all LG laptops). Are you sure you want a Sony. Check out if the warantee extends back to the UK.

Also try londondrugs.ca, NCIX.com, Frontierpc.com. Tigerdirect.ca does mailorder only but will not charge you the provincial sales tax on deliveries. If you bring back the receipts you can also claim back the GST and save 14.5% if you do out of town mailorder.

 

It may be cheaper to just go for the lower Sony VAIO S series model and then upgrade the internal parts. In any case, as an example, you can upgrade the HD to use 100GB 7200RPM, put in an internal bluetooth (a lot of people have done this), upgrade the CPU from Pentium M 1.x to Pentium M 2.1 (just by swapping the CPU). Increase the memory to 2GB using swissbit 1GB PC2700 172-pin microDIMM memory modules (see http://www.edepot.com/science.html ) As for the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB, you can even overclock it. Be sure to download the latest Catalyst 5.1 drivers from ATI.com, then patch the drivers using DhModTool utility (if you are upgrading catalyst drivers, be sure to uninstall the older catalyst drivers first). After that they install fine. To overclock it, use ATITool (.23 or higher). The stock machine comes with the Radeon at 390Mhz GPU core and 210Mhz Memory. Using the tool I was able to overclocked to 520MHz GPU core and 245MHz memory. (warning: you are doing this at your own risk, and your mileage may vary)

The following link is the 3dmark03 benchmark:
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=3642104

I think someone mentioned that you can unsolder the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 w/64MB and substitute it with a higher grade version. For example, just remove the heatsink, unsolder the chip, then pop in a ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 w/256MB. The video memory is on the Mobility Radeon chip itself, so nothing needs to be changed.

You can overclock the Pentium M (and ICH4 PCI bus I think) if you remove the memory modules and start up the machine. It should beep later on bootup, then when you install it back and press F2 key during bootup (either before replacing or after replacing memory modules I forget), you can see the advanced options for overclocking. (if you don't remove the memory modules, you only get the default non-overclocking BIOS options).

The Pentium M 2.1GHz (Dothan) is available at Newegg.com 100GB 7200RPM Harddrives should be available in February or March of 2005. The 1GB swissbit memory modules are available in many places (get two of them to get 2GB) Some people have posted their upgrade experiences at http://www.edepot.com/game.html post a question if you get stuck.

If you got the older DVD drives that came with the machine, you can upgrade the DVD RW. I think there is also a dual layer DVD RW available to swap also. As for the speakers, you can remove them and replace them with higher quality ones to get low bass sounds. It is just a plain round speaker, so just shop around for the same size and connect the wires.

Be sure to upgrade the Intel drivers on your machine. For example, the Wi-FI, LAN, and ICH4 chipset. Oh, you can pop out the Wi-FI card and replace it with Wi-fi 802.11 a/b/g version instead of the 802.11 b/g version only.

 

Hi,

I think I'm about to purchase a Sony S360. It's Dothan, right? And that means that I can easily upgrade the processor? When upgrading the processor, is it fairly simple swapping or is there soldering involved?

Also, I'd like to get a DVD-RW (dual layer) drive for the S360 - do these exist, and how hard are they to replace?

Thanks.

 

It's a Dothan and it's socketed so the replacement is really easy. There are one or two guide on how to replace CPU for S on the net, I think you can find them in www.talkvaio.com

As for internal DL drive, well, not even Japan offers that as an option, so it's impossible for you to find a drive. External is the way to go.

 

Skyshade: Could you recommend a decent dual-layer drive? What price range do they go for?

 

Um...I don't know...I bought the Sony DVDirect because I had a $200 e-coupon and it worked really well. Since Sony's drive are made by Lite-On, then I guess it applies to Lite-on too, not to mention the fact that my uncle bought a lite-on (internal, though) from newegg.com recently and it worked great.

However, the problem is that we have never used the DL function because the disc is like $10 a piece, so I can't vouch for the DL function despite having a DL drive (and worked really well burning the regular DVDs). I heard Pioneer is still the way to go if you want the most reliable drive (in terms of the created discs are most friendly to other DVD drives), but it's a word of mouth and I'll take a grain of salt with it.

As for the price range, usually you want to buy an enclosure and an internal drive. You can find a Lite-On internal around $60-$70, but other brands go up to $100 or more. Enclosure is about $40 for a decent one. In contrast, an external burner usually costs at least $200.