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    Vgn z690 bios for 8gb ram

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by mabis, Oct 13, 2012.

  1. mabis

    mabis Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi all,
    I have a (glorious) vgn z690 bought in 09 with 4gb of ram that I would like to upgrade to 8gb.
    Based on the information I found here on nbr forum it seems that my vaio won't accept 2x4gb sticks because of the bios version, that is R3054M3 (any R30XX won't allow it). So my only choice is to upgrade the bios. The latest version for my z is R4044M3 and I have a bunch of questions about this:

    1) Are there any success stories about installing 8gb with R4044M3?

    2) Like many others, I enabled advanced menu on my actual bios via EFI boot with an USB stick as described here:

    Feature Enable: Enable VT on InsydeH2O based Sony Vaio laptops, the EFI way

    in order to activate VT-x and set the VGA switching policy to 'static'. I read here

    http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/428290-vaio-z-r4041m3-bios-disables-efi-boot-3.html#post5448774

    that to do the same via the EFI boot on R4043, you have to disconnect from the motherboard both the hdd and the dvd. Does this also hold for R4044M3?

    3) Since the 4044 allows to activate VT-x, I would only need access to the bios advanced menu to set VGA switching policy to either static or auto (there is a third option, dynamic, that would be problematic). Basically both static and auto allow to switch vga under linux.
    Does anyone know what is the default switching policy for the R4044M3 bios? Or is there someone that can switch vga with R4044M3 and linux?
    My concern comes from what I read here:

    https://lists.launchpad.net/sony-vaio-z-series/msg00897.html

    it seems that another 404X bios, the M4041M3, does not allow to use the nvidia card under linux (my guess is that it sets the VGA switching policy to dynamic).

    4) Finally, is it possible to downgrade the bios version with sony official executable files? If I install the R4044M3 and realize that it's not functinal for me, would it be possible to downgrade to my previous version (R3054M3) with official .exe from sony or would it refuse to install over a newer version?

    Thanks in advance for any help on these issues (and for having read this far!), I will greatly appreciate it.
     
    mabis, Oct 13, 2012
    #1