Official VAIO E Series Owners Thread

[zenzui]

Ok cool.. That clears everything. Your GPU is ATI Radeon HD 5470 too? What is your score in Windows Experience Index?

Cheers

[Mythdat]

there seems to be an error on the Sony site. Whenever I try to customize an EA it kicks me to this website https://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs...52921644712007 ???

It does that occasionally for some reason.. if you try again a couple of hours later it should be fine

[LuTze]

Hi everyone!

I'm looking @ SONY VPC-EA1S1E/B to replace my HP 4515.
Now the main reason that I want to change my 4515 (well two reasons in fact) are:
1. screen size is too big for me and the EA has nice 14" screen with 1600x900 resolution
2. fan sound: now I read about system noise of Vaio is constant and quite audible. I am used to and am very annoyed by system noise with my AMD in 4515, I would like however like to hear any experience regarding this i3 VPC powered system noise - how's it in idle, HD video and gaming mode. i play various retro games BTW like AOE, MOHAA, WAR3...

I am currently overviewing two options to replace 4515s: Vaio EA and HP DM3. DM3 has inferior processor SU7300 C2D, that I'm reluctant to comit to, but if Vaio turns out to be too loud, I will compromise.

so I thank you in advance for any information you might provide.

[campb292]

Ok cool.. That clears everything. Your GPU is ATI Radeon HD 5470 too? What is your score in Windows Experience Index?

Cheers

Graphics 5.0
Gaming Graphics 6.2

[Perfectionist4Ever]

Cheers for clearing that up for me
I know what you mean about the Envy though
I've heard "rumours" that it's due August time but A) Who knows how accurate that is and B) Who knows what kind of configuration options we get...if any
I have a big decision to make and soon, either the Sony E with Blu-Ray and the i5-450m (offer ends the 12th) or wait it out until August*... which seems so far away right now

*And pray!

Yes the present FREE Blu-Ray Writer upgrade is a pretty sweet £140 squid saving !!

But Sony seem to have new offers every couple of weeks ...... I wish they would offer a free RAM (£20), GPU (£70) and Screen (£40) upgrade instead !!

Does anybody know of any Student deals or Corporate discounts that Sony do in the UK ??

[Perfectionist4Ever]

Executive summary: EB laptop is a huge improvement over previous 5-year-old machine (duh!); new hard drive, not so much.

Just a little treatise on swapping hard drives and comparative machine speeds in a real-world application (this is a long story!):

A couple of months ago, I purchased a ready-made EB (specs below) from J&R Electronics in New York, because the U.S. CTO site didn’t (and still doesn’t!) offer the 1080P screen as an option. The price was great compared to other 15” laptops offering a 1080P screen – I got it for about £624.75 ($950,) which ended up being closer to £591.87 ($900) after the Bing rebate. I had to make a couple of compromises though. It was an i3, and I would have preferred an i5. Also, it came with a 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive (Samsung, as it turned out), where what I really wanted was 7200 RPM.

Drive speed seemed important, because being an event photographer who processes a lot of images on location with Adobe Lightroom, having fast read and write times can mean the difference between my getting 5 hours of sleep on a given night, vs 6 hours. At least that’s how it was with my old (now dead) laptop, which was a 5-year old single-core Pentium M 2.0 Ghz (same amount of RAM).

Anyway, I bought a Western Digital 320GB 7200 drive, and planned to bring it to the Sony Style store for them to install it, so I wouldn’t void my new notebook warranty. But before I did that, I decided to run a test. I imported about 300 images into Lightroom, did my usual image processing, and then exported the whole batch into a different folder on the C drive. (Lightroom just stores the processing instructions with a “virtual copy” of the files, and then actually processes the files upon export.). The whole export part of this, which is the compute-intensive part, used to take between 45 minutes and an hour with a similar number of files on the old machine.

The first surprise was that the total export time was, instead of 45—60 minutes as on the old computer, less than 3 minutes on the new computer! OK, so given how much faster the i3 is, maybe I didn’t need to swap drives after all. But since I had the new 7200 RPM drive anyway, I cloned the original drive to it, and brought it in for the tech guy to swap.

It’s way too late to make a long story short, but after swapping drives, exporting those same 300 files took twice as long (almost 6 minutes) on the new, supposedly faster 7200 Western Digital drive. The techs told me that there are other factors in drive speed such as latency, difference in ratings methods, etc, and that yeah, it was quite possible for the original 5400 RPM drive to be faster than the replacement 7200 RPM drive. So I had them switch the drives back (which they kindly didn’t charge me for), and I’m now using the WD drive for external storage.

So apart from the drive speed lesson, I learned that the new i-series processors are WAY, WAY, faster than the old Pentium M. I thought that there might be other factors, like maybe the Lightroom 3 beta is faster than the older 1.4 version that was on my previous laptop, but I found out on my home machine that the opposite is true -- the Lightroom 3 beta ran about five times _slower_ on that machine than the old Lightroom 1.4 did. So even with a much slower version of the software, the EB runs Lightroom 15—20 times faster than the old laptop. Hope that wasn’t too confusing.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the EB overall, although as a minor complaint, I really don’t care for the feel of the chiclet keyboard. Nothing’s perfect. ) As always, YMMV.

Current notebook: Sony VAIO E VPCEB17FX/B 15.5":
· 2.13GHz Intel Core i3-330M
· 4GB (2x2GB) RAM
· 500GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
· Blu-ray ROM with DVD Burning
· ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 Graphics
· 15.5" Widescreen Display
· Integrated Webcam and Microphone
· Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
· Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
· 5.9 lb

Current desktop:
Homebuilt w/ Intel 940EE dual core hyperthreaded CPU, ASUS P5WD2 Premium mobo, 4 GB RAM, etc….., running XP--SP3.

Excellent and informative post dude !!

Is there enough room in the E to in squeeze one of the slightly thinker 1TB HDD's ??

[kokik]

hello everybody!!!

Core i5-430M 2.26 GHz
4 GB
500 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 5400 rpm
BD-ROM
full hd
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
for 799€+free http://www.itbankeurope.com/LV5T+DELUXE_/ +free shipping +2 years warranty
is good deal i think to join your club
what do you think?

[Zakkant]

Am I right, no EB with i5-520M available in sony style UK?
GRRRR...

[LuTze]

HI guys!

i'm currently looking @ SONY VPC-EA1S1E/B with i3 and 5145.
now main issue why I didn0t buy this tomally yet is the fact that people report constant fan noise from this build.
I currently have HP 4515s and the fan noise is too much to handle. I play HD movies on it sometimes and it's just too loud that's why i'm changing it.

does anyone have any exoerience with this model and can you tell me how is the fan noise with idle and under load.

thanks for the info.

[tantamount]

Excellent and informative post dude !!

Is there enough room in the E to in squeeze one of the slightly thinker 1TB HDD's ??

Don't know -- I was busy picking the brain of the other Backstage Tech at the store while the drives were being swapped. I bet you could find out if you called a Sony Store and asked for a backstage tech.

However, personally, I wouldn't do it, because the newest designs of hard drives (like anything else) tend to be less reliable than the tried & true. I tend to err on the side of caution. Remember that for storage, you can put a 2.5" drive in a E-Sata housing, and it will be just as fast as an internal drive and quite compact. You don't really need a 1 TB "C" drive. Or do you?