tip: extra drivers for vaio!

The driver download page at sony doesn't have all the drivers you might need, or the latest versions, but you can get them elsewhere. Here's what I have found so far:

You can get 2 finger scrolling and some other new gestures by first uninstalling your sony supplied synaptics touchpad driver and then installing the one from HP. This makes scrolling so much nicer.

Also at the HP site grab updated versions of all your intel drivers, including the intel turboboost technology driver, the sony page for vaio Z doesn't even have that one available so make sure to get it. The only reason not to install it is if you have a core i3.

Software & Driver Downloads HP ENVY 14-1110nr Notebook PC - HP Customer Care (United States - English)


Theres a gadget available for the turboboost technology to check how well it is working, it shows when the turbo kicks in and by how much.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3052&DwnldID=19105&lang=eng

 

I've never tried the two finger scroll from Synaptics, but instead, i use this freeware Two-Finger-Scroll off Google Code:

two-finger-scroll - Project Hosting on Google Code

Lets you program different combinations of taps to mean different things. Like 2 finger tap, 1 finger hold + 1 tap, 3 finger tap, etc.

 

It works really well, they have another gesture like 3 finger tap I didn't try it yet, and I think there's a scrybe driver addon so you can build your own gestures which should work too.

 

This 3 finger swipe works beautifully, I bet sony gimped the trackpad on purpose because they were afraid apple would sue The full synaptics driver has everything a mac has except for the 4 finger ones.

Would you happen to know what the vaio application manager is or have some screenshots of it? I had it installed on my Z when it came from microsoft, but that app isn't in the download section for the Z so I'm wondering why they went to the trouble to install it.

 

Hey, Do you live in AZ?

Anyways, the control panel allows for control over sound, brightness (Turn ambient sensor on/off) Sound, silent mode.. ect. I stumbled across it and decided not to delete it. Actually, I found the MS Sig install pretty good and stripped of most if not all garbage.

What did you not like about MS Sig?

Got the 10%, warranty and xbox free... making this the best computer purchase ever!

 

Hi maven -- nope I'm in CA, when did you get the free xbox?!! I only got the free warranty. Oh man, that sucks... I'm sure they won't give me one now

I liked the MS sig install except for a lot of the windows live stuff that I would never use, outlook email loaded with rss spam (I use thunderbird), various other stuff like the webcam software, the ms office version they installed is adware (I didn't even bother to run it and see how bad it was), and the huge recovery partition which is unnecessary if you make a backup on DVD's. All that stuff took up slightly more than 20 gigs of space, and our ssd is only 100 gigs so that saves 20% by removing it, a huge amount!

The fan on my clean install seems to sound somewhat louder and has more heat output. It's probably because it used different power plan settings.

I wanted to make a backup image of the fresh MS signature install but I wasn't able to do it, nothing I did worked. I still want a backup but I'm hours away from the MS store and they refuse to send one, they force you to come in for a re-imaging of the ssd, ridiculous!

Plus to make it worse, they want to charge me $50 for that, even though I have their 3yr assure warranty plan, which comes with 24/7 support and ADH. They're not honoring the warranty for this minor little problem just days after purchase! When I questioned them about the logic of denying such a simple support request while I am still in my return period, they said they don't care because they have a 10% restocking fee, so this whole warranty is probably not worth the paper it's printed on. I don't know if an exchange would have a restocking fee, but I might consider that, especially since another forum poster told me I should be able to run norton ghost from a hirens boot cd, and every time I tried that the thing froze. I also got bluescreens trying to load bartPE, and loading a linux disk froze up with a black screen when it got to the kernel. So perhaps mine is defective in some way.

 

Wait a second! There is NO restocking fee out here in AZ. I would be shocked if that varied from state to state. (Even if you live in broke California) I can say that because I was born and rased in the bay. LOL

I would take that thing back for any reason you can come up with and make them exchange it. Wipe the drive and take it back at 8:30 at night and tell them you need a new computer on the spot.

Seriously, they have been absoultely killer out here customer service wise. I thought they would have implimented it across the board. Tell them you are a Apple/Mac switcher, I am sure that will get their attention.

I am in the process of switching back to PC from Mac. This has been a very interesting process. Everything seems like it will work out fine... but I am paridoid about viruses. Are these still a rampant issue?

I will be extremely pissted if Apple on Wednesday puts dedicated GPU's in their 13" MBP lines and or if the new MBA is killer. The one thing that sucks about the Z Vs. the Mac is the trackpad. (Its trash compared to Apples multitouch trackpads) Win 7 is also nice, but OSX is simplistic and needs to be rebooted 1 per year. LOL!

 

Do you remember who at the store sold you the laptop and when? I might call them up and see what they say to do, the people at my store location aren't so helpful.

I haven't used a mac in a while, I had a mac portable running system6, and a powerbook 170 on system7, and an apple IIgs with proDOS and whatever else it ran. I saw a macbookpro 15" in bestbuy it was nice, but the Z is smaller and even more powerful than it, and cheaper, so I went with the Z. Have you tried this new synaptics driver yet? It makes the touchpad very similar to the mac way of doing things, it's configurable in the control panel applet too.

There will always be virii, the macs aren't a popular target yet but they do have some. One of the best antivirus & firewalls for windows is kaspersky internet security suite, and I strongly recommend to get it as well as firefox and the adblock plugin for your browser, don't ever use internet explorer unless you really need to. Certain school, government websites, or banks might require explorer, that's about it.

You should get all your computers behind a router with stealthed ports, and the router will give out natted IP addresses, you will be better protected for it. Some routers also have a stateful packet inspection firewall which is a good feature.

Make sure to always keep windows and all your software updated, especially adobe products like acrobat and flash! Hackers can easily get control of a website you trust and put a virus on it, if you simply go to that website and don't even do anything it can run an exploit against an unpatched software or plugin for your browser such as acrobat reader or flash. Just last week I went to the website for iriver the mp3 player company and it tried to driveby-download a virus onto my machine. There are numerous other ways to get a virus or get hacked when running windows. As bad as it is though, I have only suffered a single virus infection my whole time using windows and I have been using it since version 3.1.