Official Sony SB/SA/SC/SD Series Owners' Thread

[drewgold]

That would work. This is what I use and it works flawlessly: Newegg.ca - G.SKILL 4GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Laptop Memory Model F3-10666CL9S-4GBSQ

Thanks for the feedback! Just picked one up from Memory Express for $26.00, seems like a great deal to me and works great too!

[gnrtool82]

FYI, I discovered that if you uninstall the stock Sony ALPS drivers for the touchpad, and install these instead:

ALPS

..then you can enable two-finger horizontal and vertical scroll - or at least it works on my VPCSA290X. They call it "Pan Scroll" in the options. There are also a bunch more things to tweak in the newer control panel compared to the sony one, so that's nice too.

One caveat: Two-finger scrolling isn't perfect, and not as smooth as an Macbook/Macbook Pro touch pad (my last machine was a 15" unibody MBP). It can jump a bit, depending on which program you are using and how you swipe (for example, Chrome with the smoothscroll extension works best if you press fairly firmly when swiping- even then, however, it will sometimes accidentally click). Give it a try - You can always roll back to stock!

P.S.
I got the driver link from here: ALPS Touchpad - latest drivers - LaptopVideo2Go Forums - Page 2

very nice indeed. my only issue is that you don't seem to be able to turn off the icons that appear when scrolling (the icon of the trackpad with a finger telling me i'm scrolling.. i know i'm scrolling, i don't need a picture to tell me that, the moving content tells me this!)

if there is a way to disable that, that would make me extremely happy!

regardless, thank you!

[donnieblasko]

very nice indeed. my only issue is that you don't seem to be able to turn off the icons that appear when scrolling (the icon of the trackpad with a finger telling me i'm scrolling.. i know i'm scrolling, i don't need a picture to tell me that, the moving content tells me this!)

if there is a way to disable that, that would make me extremely happy!

regardless, thank you!

Yeah I noticed that too - so far I find the two-finger scrolling useful enough for me to ignore the annoying icons, but if somebody can figure out a way to turn them off (registry tweak?) that would be awesome

[electronicsguy]

Its definitely not as smooth as macbooks but I think its equivalent to other windows based 2-finger scrolling touchpads. The glass touchpad with the macbooks really does wonders for multi-touch!

very nice indeed. my only issue is that you don't seem to be able to turn off the icons that appear when scrolling (the icon of the trackpad with a finger telling me i'm scrolling.. i know i'm scrolling, i don't need a picture to tell me that, the moving content tells me this!)

if there is a way to disable that, that would make me extremely happy!

regardless, thank you!

[Crystal1988]

^ it would be interesting to see how touchpad would behave with a hackintosh installed, to understand if the "issue" is in the touchpad itself or the way signals are interpreted.

But it's illegal, so this curiosity will remain not answered.

[willysp]

I am considering buying a Vaio SB. I am not familiar with Sony laptops and have just heard that, at least in past, Sony have disabled hardware virtualization and excluded the option in the BIOS for the user to enable it. Can hardware virtualization be enabled on the Vaio SB? Thanks.

Standard BIOS feature in the SA. So, would assume SB, too.

[ceffect]

Try adjusting with the touch sensitivity settings (higher works better for me), as well as the mouse movement setttings both in the Windows mouse control panel as well as the speed setting in the drivers. The stair-like movement I've always had to some degree (even with stock drivers) if I touched lightly on the pad. I think it's the result of a lower quality touch sensor, as seen in these smartphone touchscreen tests: Smartphone touchscreen test LetsGoMobile

Adjusting sensitivity higher and setting the movement speed a bit higher seems to help reduce it, at least for me :\

I don't like a higher sensitivity. I actually turn mine down. Plus at higher sens, the stair-like movement becomes harsher.

Going back to Sony touchpad drivers, never had it with them.

[Hagakure]

Hey Guys,
I wanted to thank you all for your advice and all the information that you found out. I just bought my laptop two weeks ago and received it yesterday (SB). Simply an amazing laptop ! I used to have a macbook black, which was becoming very very old...

So here is my contribution :
According to me, there are two major issues:
- Trackpad. Scrolling is terrible.... But you can resolve this issue by having a bluetooth mouse.
- Fan. I don't get it but sometimes fans jsut increase and then decrease, increase, decrease, etc (yeah i do have the update)... However, it may be the index process so it may not be a real major issue.

I don't get it about the screen. I'm extremely happy with it and watching movies is just fine !

Anyway, thanks a lot to you guys for all the advice (again). Thanks to you I've been able to reinstall from start (even though I know how to do it ), install the necessary software, change my wifi card (AMAZING !!!!), change my ODD (i'm having a little issue here since it doesn't fit exactly )... 10 seconds to start my laptop thanks to my SSD. AWESOME !!!


Anyway, if someone is reading this thread, is having a macbook BLACK but wants to change (with a PC), just GO FOR IT ! It's almost the same, but in better :-)


Cheers

[dispcent]

For anyone curious about multiple external screens, I can confirm that Displaylink works without problems.

I bought an HP unit, NL571AA, which in the UK I found for about £35 delivered. This has the newer DL-165 chipset so can do 1080p which is perfect for my 2nd monitor.

It's nice to have both external monitors working again :-)

[jeremyshaw]

Its definitely not as smooth as macbooks but I think its equivalent to other windows based 2-finger scrolling touchpads. The glass touchpad with the macbooks really does wonders for multi-touch!

This the WORST windows 2 finger scroll I've ever used. ALPS = general useless piles of worthless crap, in general. Almost everyone else uses Synaptics for a reason, even Apple does.