topic Re: VAIO FZ Owner in PCs & Accessories

VAIO FZ Owner

luisarn — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 23:17:39 GMT

Hello everybody! I'm new here and my name is Luis Neng, I'm an Interface Consultant from Spirituc, a portuguese design agency

We bought 2 new Sony VAIO FZ series notebook, the FZ11S and the FZ11Z.
They originally came with Windows Vista Home Premium installed but we upgraded it to Windows Vista Business to solve domain logons issues.

They're pretty nice and I'm loving it, mainly my FZ11Z.
Seems the vaio-link ftp site still doesn't have anything for the FZ series so I managed to go to the other continent (Sony America) to download some essential drivers to put the basic VAIO functions work (Shorcut Button, AV Mode Button, Event Service...)
I downloaded the files of VAIO FZ190. Seems our neighbor's are able to customize their VAIO and have a more updated download sites. Wondering why Sony Europe don't give us the chance to customize our VAIO's...

Anyway... about the FZ11S, I have some problems with it. Blue screen of death. I've been testing it heavily this weekend to find out where the problem came from and I get around a dozen of blue screens with some KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR. I though it was a defective hard drive but the chkdsk is telling me that the hdd is fine. Then I found out the blue screen happens when the AVG anti-virus is running. I reinstalled it and now seems fine.
I will continue to test it and will give you guys a more detailed report later.

Oh... for those who wanna upgrade the FZ to Windows Vista Business, remember to make the recovery cd!!! I upgraded mines without making the recovery cd and now I "lost" all the original Sony VAIO software. The only way to have it back is pressing F10 at boot time and recover it to factory settings but I can't do that because I already have all my projects in the VAIO. Is there anybody who can send me the Vaio Recovery Utilities? I just wanna recover some applications like the "My Club VAIO".

Thank you and have a nice day!

Luis Neng

Re: VAIO FZ Owner

kee-lo_ — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 11:12:33 GMT

Ola Luis, and welcome to the Club

Why not use the drivers that are on the DVD, they should definately work with Vista Business.

Re: VAIO FZ Owner

luisarn — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 13:16:10 GMT

Ola Luis, and welcome to the Club

Why not use the drivers that are on the DVD, they should definately work with Vista Business.

Hello Kee-Lo!
I don't have the DVD... my VAIO came with an hidden partition and I never created the recovery disk. I only can see the "Drivers" folder on C:\ and I'm using it but unfortunately it misses a lot of utilities which means, no event services, no shortcut buttons, function keys doesn't work, etc...

So I've been searching on the internet to find a solution and I found out that there's an US Version FZ with the same specifications as mine and they have almost all the utilities for download on their website! And the best part, for Windows Business.

Now I can get my shortcut buttons working, function keys, Av Mode Launcher, Power Management and Camera Capture Utility too.

Still missing a bunch of softwares so I'm looking for the Sony Recovery Utility with the hope that it could access the hidden partition and install the software from there.
I just can't find the Sony Recovery Utility anywhere!

Does anybody have it and be able to send it to my email address? luisarn@gmail.com

Thank you!

Re: VAIO FZ Owner

luisarn — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 10:05:14 GMT

Ok... I have been testing the problematic FZ11S heavily in my design agency and still can't find the cause of the Blue Screen Of Death.
I managed to restore the FZ11S to factory settings. Runned the Vaio diagnostic tools to check the CPU, RAM and HDD, took me a few hours of waiting.
No errors found, seems the hardware is ok.

Then I uninstalled all the Norton software and installed AVG. Everything works fine. Full system scan, no errors. Excellent!

Upgrade time, Windows Vista Business, all Vaio original drivers and then a fresh install of AVG.

Ok... full system scan and 5 minutes later, Blue Screen Of Death. I have no idea what is going on. Any ideas?

Re: VAIO FZ Owner

kee-lo_ — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:21:18 GMT

It's hard to diagnose, do you get to see what the blue screen says?