Vaio Z 'stutters'

Hello everyone,

I've noticed that my Z series occasionally stutters - the mouse kind of sticks for a second or two before it starts moving normally again. The HDD light doesn't come on, and I'm not doing anything in particular when it happens - I mostly notice when I'm browsing the internet with Firefox but it happens with Chrome too. It's fairly annoying.

Any ideas what might be causing it?

Thanks in advance.

 

I've noticed stutters myself, and for me, the issue is my external mouse. I have a wireless mouse/keyboard combo, and I can go weeks without any stuttering, then suddenly I notice both my mouse and keyboard stuttering badly. When I move the cursor with the touchpad, or type on the laptop's keyboard, no stuttering.

At first I thought the battery was going in my mouse/keyboard, but even after changing them, the stuttering persisted. What I finally had to do was unplug my wireless receiver and plug it back in.

It's a strange problem that could be due to either my wireless setup or the Z's usb ports.

-Peter

 

I have the same thing. It's not that frequent, once every couple of days or so. It seems to happen more often when I'm moving over the taskbar - it's strange as I'm not doing anything particularly intensive at the time that would eat up the CPU. As I don't have any other PCs using Windows 7, I just thought it was just windows being rubbish! I just have a bog standard USB mouse.

 

Next time this happens, see if the stuttering goes away while using the trackpad. I suspect there is something going on with the usb ports, but can't tell for sure.

-Peter

 

Contrary to what you think, moving the mouse over the taskbar is one of the most intensive things you can do in Windows Aero.

It has to create previews for the tasks there, which for some apps means refreshing the apps window, which in turn can include "expensive" operations like connecting to remote sites to update information. And if you roll over the "Show desktop" button, and have Aero Peek enabled, it has to create previews for ALL windows, minimized or not.

The preview generation becomes extra bad for browser windows on web sites that have an unconditional "do-not-cache" on all elements, so they have to be re-fetched.
And many browsers (like Firefox) update the "last visited" information for all the loadable elements on a page, which means disk writes.
If your drive suffers from high latency for random writes, this can cause stuttering. You don't see the drive light when the problem occurs (when the drive reorganizes sectors to clear up a space for a random write), but right after it (when the actual write happens).

Normally, rolling over the taskbar is not a problem for most users, but if you have several "heavy" apps, especially combined with high latency networking and slow-random-write SSDs, it can indeed cause stuttering.
If so, either change your habits, or turn off Aero Preview and Aero Peek.

 

Happens to me a couple times a day. It's part of the charm of having a Sony Z. Kind of like an old British roadster. Embrace it.

 

I have the same problem too. It must be something with synaptics drivers

 

Update the drivers?

 

Seems like a fair few people are experiencing the same thing. You don't think it's slightly irritating?! It bugs me.

Drivers are the most up to date ones.

 

You can bump up the priority of the Synaptics processes. If that helps, it's likely not the driver's fault, but something else going on on the system that had higher priority.

(On the old Z, I use a small vbs script to do just that for the apoint drivers, called from the startup folder)

 

Wait, are you seeing stuttering with the touchpad? I've never seen that - only with an external mouse.

-Peter

 

Yes - I'm only using the touchpad, haven't even plugged an external mouse in yet.

 

So it seems to me that the stuttering happens most frequently when a web page is being brought up - half of it will load, everything will freeze for a second or two, then the rest of the page will load.

Is this something to do with the hard drive? Or more likely something else?

 

I get this too! Web pages will load half way and then pause for a long period before completing. :/

Task manager shows the memory and processor load as low when this happens.

 

What browser are you guys using? Not firefox 4 beta right?

 

I'm using IE8.

This is the i7 + US 256SSD

 

Which gen Z are you folks using?

Are you in "Stamina" mode? I get slight "stutter" in stamina but none in "Speed" or "Auto" mode.

 

speed mode.

 

I'm using Firefox, Z12, in Auto mode. Mine's the i5-520m version.

 

So does anyone have any suggestions about what might be causing this? Or any experiences of it? There are a couple of people in this thread with similar issues and it's really starting to bother me! I don't want to have to get my laptop fixed by Sony...

 

Hi, I have the same problem with my Vaio Z116 (Asian model, Core i5) too. It stutters usually when my mouse (both touchpad / ext. mouse) is over the taskbar buttons. I only noticed the problem when I'm on stamina mode though.

Just a while ago, I set my Windows power plan to 'High Performance', and the problem seems to have disappeared (it seems to stutter only in Power Saver/Balanced mode). Have a feeling it has something to do with the CPU throttling down. Maybe you guys can try switching your power plan?


-Jens