Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *Part 3*

[Drambuie]

Something is really skewed in the Canadian vs US F12 CTO pricing.

Specs for both Canadian and US CTO for identical builds:

Intel® Core™ Quad i7-740QM processor (1.73GHz)
Microsoft Windows® 7 Professional
Black
6GB (4GBx1 + 2GBx1) DDR3-SDRAM-1333
500 GB SATA Hard Disk Drive [7200 rpm]
Blu-ray Disc™ Read Only Drive
16.4" VAIO Premium Display (1920x1080) Full HD
NVIDIA® GeForce® 330M GPU (1GB VRAM)
Keyboard Backlight
Large Capacity Battery

No Engraving
No Fresh Start™
Microsoft® Office 2010 Home & Student
Adobe Creative Bundle
Norton Internet Security™ 2010 (2 year subscription)


Total cost from Sonystyle.ca = $1547.12 CAD
Total cost from Sonystyle.com = $1869.97 USD = $1963 CAD approx

That's a $416 CAD difference for identical machines.
If you upgrade the Blu-ray to a burner, add $80 to the US price and $26 to the Canadian price.

[MelodyMaster]

Something is really skewed in the Canadian vs US F12 CTO pricing.

Specs for both Canadian and US CTO for identical builds:

Intel® Core™ Quad i7-740QM processor (1.73GHz)
Microsoft Windows® 7 Professional
Black
6GB (4GBx1 + 2GBx1) DDR3-SDRAM-1333
500 GB SATA Hard Disk Drive [7200 rpm]
Blu-ray Disc™ Read Only Drive
16.4" VAIO Premium Display (1920x1080) Full HD
NVIDIA® GeForce® 330M GPU (1GB VRAM)
Keyboard Backlight
Large Capacity Battery

No Engraving
No Fresh Start™
Microsoft® Office 2010 Home & Student
Adobe Creative Bundle
Norton Internet Security™ 2010 (2 year subscription)


Total cost from Sonystyle.ca = $1547.12 CAD
Total cost from Sonystyle.com = $1869.97 USD = $1963 CAD approx

That's a $416 CAD difference for identical machines.
If you upgrade the Blu-ray to a burner, add $80 to the US price and $26 to the Canadian price.

Nothing new, right back to the early days of the F11 Candian pricing has always been lower than American. And there were some REAL bargains in options, such as the 256 Gig SSD for just $225 compared with over $500 for American buyers.

[Joe Bleau]

So, I should go ahead and wipe it?

Why not?

Maybe you missed this post: VAIO_F12 Clean Install w/ Recovery Discs Creation.

*****

I never even held an iphone in my hand until 30 minutes ago when my teen Tica neighbor just brought me her locked iphone caused probably by an auto-update when she went to the internet cafe to copy some music.

I'm in iphone jailbraking tutorial hell & it's not even my thing. I had to download & install the loathed iTunes. Luckily I did it with Revo Uninstaller Pro.

[OoTLink]

At the same time I bought this, I bought my wife a Dell Studio XPS 9000 desktop for her desk at church. Core i7 720 with 12GB of 1066Mhz triple channel memory, same GT 330 video card. For some reason, this machine is faster at everything in normal day to day light computing. The XPS is faster when getting into heavy computing however.

Considering the portability, I would choose this (actually, I DID choose this!) over the XPS 9000.

The XPS 9000 probably has an i7 920, there's no way the i7 in our laptop is faster than the i7 920. At best, it's about as fast as an i5 (720?). The desktop GT330 is also a different card (the 330m we have is a die shrunk 240m, which is a die shrunk 9600m, which is a faster 8600m).

I dunno if you have the 6gb model or a faster 8gb model, but I have a feeling the 4+2gb and the 5400rpm HD in the VPCF115FM rob the machine of performance and make it a lot slower than it should be.

Just saying

Back to where I was now, and why I said what I said: When you start playing games on the F series, the fans kick in and the palm rest gets pretty warm, ironically hottest where your right hand would probably sit. Even though it is one of the coolest laptops I've ever owned, it still manages to make me break a sweat on a hot day if I'm playing games.

A desktop is self-contained and not underneath your keyboard/mouse, so you don't have to worry about that. You can also get an IPS LCD for a desktop with much better color reproduction and viewing angles, so that is a plus too.

And then there's the GPU choices, faster disk drives (and more options in that front).. I dunno..

I've got nothing against the laptop since I own one, and it happens to be the fastest machine I own too (by far), but.. yea.

[Impulse14]

This is an extremely nooby question but...what's the point of making Recovery Discs if i may ask? Is it something we all need or something only some of us need because of what we plan on doing to the comp.

sorry besides that, i didnt get fresh start so i was wondering if there's any bloatware that i should immediately delete or figure out how to turn off unless needed?

[MickyMax]

One question guys...

Do you think we can upgrade the 720qm from the F11 to the 840QM (from the F12) ? No problems with the socket (which is the same) but with the bios ?

Thanks

[Joe Bleau]

This is an extremely nooby question but...what's the point of making Recovery Discs if i may ask? Is it something we all need or something only some of us need because of what we plan on doing to the comp.

sorry besides that, i didnt get fresh start so i was wondering if there's any bloatware that i should immediately delete or figure out how to turn off unless needed?

Start > Help & Support > Use My_VAIO:

Sony_VAIO Personal Computer User Guide > Recovery Discs:

You can restore your main hard disk drive to the original factory configuration. The amount of time required to complete the restore varies, depending on the amount of software being restored and the speed of your computer.

You may need to recover your computer when:

Your computer has been infected with a computer virus that cannot be repaired using installed antivirus programs.

Your computer’s performance is unstable.

You have deleted the main C: drive on your computer by mistake.

You want to restore the recovery drive partition to the main hard disk drive.

Using Recover Computer
The Recover Computer process requires recovery discs. If you have not created your recovery media, go to Create Recovery Disc before attempting to recover your computer.

I would add:

- You want to return to factory state & securely wipe the HDD of all your personal data before selling the unit or sending it for repair.

- You HDD is dead. Restore factory state on new HDD.

- You want to do a clean install from a generic Win 7 OS & would like the OEM drivers & some or all of the OEM Value added software.

- You want to do a customized for your F clean install as explained in link in my sig below.

- Etc.

It cost only a few $ to make them yourself or $70 to order from_Sony.

[Joe Bleau]

A new Broadcom Bluetooth Firmware Update is out for my VPCF115FM: 06/28/2010. While the date was changed, it seems it's the same firmware update that came out 1-2 months ago for my F. I ran it anyway.

Check esupport for your model to see if applicable to your machine.

This utility updates the Broadcom Bluetooth firmware to version 2.2.3.593.596a to resolve an issue where a Bluetooth device does not maintain connection with the computer.

[tausif]

Mine was flagged as needing it so I updated. The idling fan is now louder than it was before perhaps somewhat predictably

Joe,

I spoke too soon ... it was loud on the restart only immediately after the update. I turned it on later and there was no noticable difference.

[Joe Bleau]

Joe,

I spoke too soon ... it was loud on the restart only immediately after the update. I turned it on later and there was no noticable difference.

"I spoke too soon" - I tend to do that a lot, that's why there is so many edit in my posts. (besides the typos)

Good news then.