sony FS series - Page 3

I agree, the FS is a really great laptop for the money.

I have an FS570, upgraded to a Hitachi 7k60 with Windows XP Pro.

Today I was pushing the limits on it and I was able to run a Norton Virus scan, Windows Spyware scan, play an audio file in Windows Media Player with the Engery Bliss visual and surf the net at the same time without any lag.

The CPU ussage topped about 94%.

Personally I don't have any problem with the speaker volume. I think they sound pretty good.

Picked up my FS215S yesterday because of the awesome screen, but mine has a dead pixel Also the fan is always on which is quite annoying and I also have the low-brightness-noise-problem... Well, guess I'll just have to live with it.

ive had an fs500 for about a month, i use it almost solely for work (im a programmer and network engineer), so i needed something with alot of screen space (useful when you have to edit 4000+ lines of code in an ssh window...), but not an exceptional video card, since i have a beast of a gaming machine at home (radeon 9800, ath64 3400+, etc). It is fine for me, but hardly ideal. here are some pros and cons:

Pros:

• phenominal screen. absolutely beautiful. brighter and clearer than my $350+ desktop lcd
• good sound too
• comfy keyboard and mouse
• good processor (PM 730 Sonoma, quad pumped fsb, 2mb l2 cache, 1.6ghz). with 512mb ram, more than enough to compile even gigantic C apps.
• solid construction. it may be plastic, but its not that cheap dell/acer plastic...thank god.
• hard drive is easy to swap, three screws. I can take the whole machine apart and put it back together in 10 minutes. not bad

Cons:

• no wsxga. thats a big one. 1280x800 makes stuff look pretty big and chunky to me, but probably fine for the average user
• the fan/DVD drive are LOUD, but the fan only turns itself on about 30 seconds in an hour of normal use...but when mingw is running with -O2 flags, it can get pretty irritating, and the DVD drive isnt any worse than most laptop drives.
• comes with xp home....
• driver installation is a bitch and a half. even the recovery disks dont consistantly work. sony did a very poor job writing drivers for the hardware. this isnt really a concern unless you reformat alot though.
• its a 15.4" wxga. it may only weight 6.5lbs, but it is NOT portable. it's too bulky
• battery life is far from amazing. 2.5 hours tops with the screen all the way down, less if you are listening to music. even all the way down, it's still brighter than my girlfriend's gateway on high... not a stellar performance on the part of the sony engineers. with XBrite all the way up, the battery drains in 45-50 minutes, but given how bright it is, thats no surprise.
• expensive....but not as expensive as an IBM

verdict: wonderful mid-range desktop replacement, I would rather watch a DVD on this than on my desktop or television. Not so wonderful for carrying to work every day. fast enough to do anything but serious gaming, especially if you upgrade to a 770 and a gig of ram (and it can probably game pretty well if you buy the optional geforce 6300 vid card). If i had to do it all over again, i would have bought a 14" thinkpad with a 1400x1050 screen...about 300$ more, but worth it to me.

I have a FS645P/H. Unfortunately I wasn't able to purchase it configured to my preference. I was very disapointed the the lack of available factory upgrades, (Video Adapter, HDD, Screen resolution, RAM, etc.)

So I swaped out the 4200RPM Travelstar drive for a Hitachi 7200RPM Trvelstar E7K60, then loaded it with a slimed down Windows XP Pro. The removal/installation was super simple. Next I threw out the 2 256MB DDR 333mhz RAM for 2 Corsair Value Select (VS1GSDS533D2), 1GB DDR2 533mhz. So now I have a total of 2GB DDR2 533mhz RAM, and what a difference. I think that when Sony states max 1GB RAM supported, they mean 1GB per slot.

Now I am just going to wait for the price to come down on a Pentium-M 2.13Ghz and a compatible 256MB Video card and I'll swap those out too.

If any of you are going to upgrade your hard drive, be sure to make recovery CDs/DVDs first, or you will not be able to adjust screen brightness or make use of special function buttons S1 & S2. The required software is not available for download and to my suprise, Sony doesn't ship recovery software with their notebooks (I realized this after I formatted the stock HDD).

Aside from a few annoyances (lack of higher resolution, the worst tech support ever and lack of available upgrades) I really like this notebook.

Oh yeah, gotta go with 7200 rpm and memory upgrades. What kind of compatible video card do you think is going to come out?

Hi, you are the first FS owner that I know that is using DDR2 memory modules. I am surprised to read that DDR2 works on FS cause the DDR2 DIMM is slightly different than DDR2 DIMM. Do you have any memory benchmark scores for DDR2 on FS?

By the way, the VAIO applications can be downloaded from Vaio UK site.

I am keeping my eyes out for a Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra or ATI Mobility X800, both 256MB.

No benchmark results, give me some time.

I wish someone at Sony would have pointed that out for me, I looked at Sony UK was was unable to access any downloads. Instead I ended up dishing out $30.00 for Recovery DVD set.

O_o The video card's upgradable? I was thinking about an fs660 or just configuring one on Sony's site. If I can upgrade to DDR 533, and later down the road get a better video card, it sounds like a sweet deal. The only thing that I'm still iffy on is the battery life. Has anyone tried the larger battery and does that give more acceptable results?

gaming

how do you guys think the sony FS series (especially the higher end models) will hold up to games like battlefield 2?

With my 660 I run counter-strike source fine, I haven't tried hl2 but I could... honestly it just want you would except for gaming on the go. the frame rates are stable and the graphics are pretty tight. I'll admit the battery is sh*t, but I find outlets. I dont know how it will handle battlefield 2 but I think it will hold up. If what you are looking for is a full out gaming rig, then I suggest you look at the XPS or Alienware... but be ready to pay the price. I got my FS660 for $1400 so I am happy with what I got for the money. Back to gaming... like I said before it will hold up but dont expect 6800 ultra performance or anything, however the screen is crisp & beautiful and games will definetly take advantage of that.

I've got 1.5 GB in my 640. left the single 512 in and added 1GB stick off newegg ($120) and put in 100GB drive 5400rpm


like it but resolution sucks, need at least 1400

notably, BB and CC have no 15 or 15.4 laptops that do higher than 1280x800...

im almost thinking about that 17in gateway (7.7 lbs) 8150 (m680) that BB has for $1250 after rebate.... but it feels kinda cheap compared to FS.

thinking of getting an fs but am kind of put down by the slow hard drive, is it swappable to a 7200 or a 5400?

Yup, easy to upgrade.

Hi there
you were correct in your first statement. It is impossible to install DDR2 in a curent Vaio FS model. Even the number of pins is identical, the dent on DDR2 RAM is not at the same position. Also the voltage of DDR2 RAM is lower. So even if you somehow manage to push the RAM in the slot, you end up with either a broken mainboard or RAM bars.
The max. amount of RAM which will be addressed by the mainboard is 1Gbyte according to the published specification. I have upgrade mine to 1Gbyte and switched off virtual memory completely, and even when having lots of apps open and doing memory intensive stuff at the same time, i still got lots of free RAM space left.

Btw the theoretical gain in performance by using DDR2 RAM is not that huge, the bottleneck in the Vaio FS is the slow 4200rpm harddisk and the GF2 6200go if you do graphic intensive stuff.

Regards from Switzerland,
Martin