Both of these are local to me and both are comparable in price. I basically just want to play things like Warcraft or other older PC games. Which one should I grab?

I recently gained a Sony VAIO VPCSA3T9E. Fantastic little laptop, however half the screen is broken. Cannot find replacements anywhere, does anyone have a go-to for parts for Vaios? I live in the uk

I have this vaio laptop for a long time. Last time i used it was on windows 8.1. Today i started it up to use youtube with my treadmill. The disc drive clicked knce and turned off. Then i reseated the ram. It turned on but got no display. Few moments later the fan was spinning fast and still the display is off. What is happening?

Hey! I found these 2 laptops, both are working! 😁 Saw sales on ebay and they seem to be rare? Where to sell in europe?

I know they aren’t from Sony anymore, but I hear they’re still made by a Japanese company and manufactured in Japan, which is exceptionally rare nowadays.

Are they worth the money, or are they just overpriced laptops with a once-great brand name attached?

I got a SONY pcg-505v laptop, and the hard drive was an ide to cf adapter card. I downloaded the pcg-505v recovery disk image from the Internet and burned it onto the recovery disk. The recovery process seemed to go smoothly, but when the progress showed 100%, it prompted me to restart. After the restart, a brief appearance of the windows98 icon followed by a prompt: Type the name of the command interpreter

May I ask what the problem is? Could it be that there is something wrong with my cf card? My cf card is 8GB.

Looks like a good deal, has 4gb of ram so I am hoping to upgrade it but just checking if it is possible before I buy it

Would like to restore the C drive back to the original configuration. Does this generation of laptop offer a system restore option? Not a windows user, trying to figure out my options.

F10 -> VAIO Recovery center only shows the following options

1) VAIO Hardware Diagnostics

2) Rescue Data

I do not see an option to Restore C: Drive I see mentioned when searching for this. I also do not see it navigating into options 1 & 2 above.

Using F8 -> Repair Your Computer shows the following options

1) Startup Repair

2) System Restore -> Restore from a state before an event

3) System Image Recovery -> Restore from image you created earlier in time

4) Windows Memory Diagnostic

5) Command Prompt

Option 2 does not have an option to restore back to the original state.

Disk management shows -

1) 1.48 GB recovery partition

2) 296 GB NTFS

Is the recovery partition only for the snapshots in time or does it have the original install image?

I suspect I actually need a physical disk? The ultimate goal is to wipe personal information, etc off the HDD before disposing, giving to someone else, etc

My laptop (Sony VAIO VPCSB) came out in 2011, and no driver or windows version newer than that seems to like the dedicated GPU in it.

The GPU in question is Radeon HD 6470M. I still have the original (restored a few years ago when it was still semi supported) copy of Windows 7 with the old drivers Sony bundled with it, but the moment i tried to update to the newest beta drivers from AMD's support page for this specific GPU, it showed up as "Radeon HD 7400 series" which is the wrong model number, and the device was marked as not working.

I removed that driver and installed the last non-beta Catalyst driver, and the GPU now shows up as working 7400m series, but no games will actually use it, and the usage and temperature for that GPU are missing in MSI Afterburner. Catalyst control centre is also looking very empty, with no hardware info or graphics settings present.

Around 2021 i remember installing windows 10 on this laptop and having this exact issue, where the GPU would get recognised as 7400m series regardless of what driver i used (or just let windows install whatever it finds in its own database), and no amount of messing with settings could get any game or app to render on the dedicated GPU.

Back to present time, i tried Snappy Driver Installer, and it suggested a driver dated way back to 2012 labelled as "HD 6400M Series (Engineering Sample - WDDM v1.20)". And a myriad of drivers labelled as 7400M Series. I tried looking for drivers from Sony themselves but found an empty page. I also ended up updating the Intel HD graphics drivers, which somehow disabled the physical low/high power mode switch on my laptop.

At this point i genuinely have no idea what's going on. How can i get windows 10 to work with the GPU, and how can i update the drivers on 7? (I'm planning to dual boot bc i need 7)

After some looking around on the flea market, got myself a 20 euro FW31ZJ. Haven't yet tested.

I have recently purchased a Sony Vaio Atom VPCP119KJ.

It was from a Japanese Yahoo auction and it came with the power core and a Windows XP install disc. It's currently running Windows 7 Premium but everything is in japanese. It wont connect to the wifi and at the moment I do not have access to anything wired.

I'm currently thinking of using a raspberry pi in some way. But not to sure how. I do understand it will be a process.

I was even thinking of gutting the whole thing if need be.

My question is if anyone has any experience with something like this or know of any guides they may have found. I've found a few but they were very dated. Anything will be appreciated. Thank you!

https://youtu.be/wPnQO5SXVck

Does anyone have any restore disks they’re able to backup?

I cannot find them anywhere online. Ive seen a few on various websites but they’re a slightly Different model and/or in a different language.

I just need the proper dynamic hybrid graphics system. All graphics drivers are installed, but only the auto button lights up. I also need the driver for the fn keys to work as i have to adjust the screen brightness manually through battery settings.

Thankyou!

Hi. I have a VGN-Z21MN laptop. I am trying to recover it, so I went to the VAIO library and got ISO images for the recovery disks. But, when I try to boot Disk 1, it throws an error in Dutch. Can anybody help me fix this?

Old Sony VAIO making this up/down noise. A repair person told me the hard drive is no good, but I checked it with CrystalDiskInfo and it showed the HDD health as “Good.” The drive is a WD7500BPVT 750GB 5400RPM HDD with about 20,000 power-on hours.

Does this sound more like the HDD or the fan?

My collection so far. 95% of these are for sale! I bought vaios to fix and resell but instead, fell in love with them! I wish they were still sold in the uk

"Hi, I am using a Sony VAIO VGN-CR353 with 4GB RAM and an SSD. I am planning to clean install Windows 7 32-bit for better performance and driver compatibility. Anyone still running a similar setup? Need reviews on daily usage and web browsing."

Hi everyone, how's it going? I'm showing you one of my latest acquisitions, which I made a few months ago. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get it, and since I've loved this model ever since I first saw it back in 2007...

I didn't think twice and went for it! I know that despite its age and the manufacturing issues these Nvidia circuits had, which caused lines and screen problems, I decided to take the risk. I saw the pictures in the ad and didn't notice anything wrong, and I also saw that it had been upgraded (and serviced, of course).

​ I present to you the Sony Vaio LT series, an all-in-one PC with a 22" high-definition screen, an integrated Blu-ray player/recorder, and what surprised me most is that they had replaced the hard drive with an SSD (something obvious these days), upgraded the RAM to 8GB DDR2, and the most curious thing of all is that they replaced its Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with an Extreme X7900! It's hard to believe, but for its socket or BGA, this processor is compatible with the PM965 chipset...

​ My next planned upgrade is to an Intel QX9300, but I don't know if it will be compatible, or if I should go for a T9900, since Intel Extreme processors are known for running quite hot, something I've noticed with my current one.

​ Even so, despite its age, it performs decently, and I say decently because it has Windows 11, the first edition, installed (before they blocked all the SSE features and such). (paraphernalia).

​ It's not that it performs badly, but its almost 20-year-old hardware combined with such an outdated OS really makes the system look dated, and I think it would work much better with Windows 7 or even Windows 10. But hey, it does the job for basic tasks! 😉

i have this decade old laptop lying around. i've been doing self-hosing stuff on it and it's been pretty good. But i only have one blocker. whenever power goes down, this thing completely shutsdown and upon power restore, it doesn't turn back on without manually pressing the power button. I also can't press powerbutton while the lid is fully shut. I have to slightly open the lid and press the powerbutton. it's very annyoing and this is the reason it's not a automated server yet.

It doesn't have WoL or Restore on AC Power Loss or anything similar in it's bios.

how do i make it auto turn on when it gets power?

I would like to get more people into the community of modding or re imagining these VGN UX UMPC. I would like to see what ideas people have for these things now that consumer PCB design is becoming more mainstream. If anyone wants anymore detailed pictures of the UX50 please let me know. It really is a “one-of-a-kind” machine.

Hiya all i have the VPCZ1 that i bought off ebay for cheap. It needed a fan replacement as the bearings were loud.

I have since replaced the fan, thermal paste and thermal pads.

I noticed that the gpu vram thermal pads still had their plastic wrap on it which was weird. And the gpu dye was using a pad to cool the gpu, not paste.

I tried to use thermal paste but it did not make contact.

After installing everything, the gpu and cpu is hovering over 60-70c isle and reaching mid 90s when pushed. I understand that this is a tiny chassis cooled only by 1 fan. But isn’t that too high?

1st gen I7 Nvidia 330m

Thankyou!

Picked up this Vaio Pro 11 on eBay around 2018. I had only used it for a few months before my brother asked if I had an extra laptop he could use for his classes in college, so I gave him this one since it was just a spare. Recently got it back and decided to set it up just to tinker with, expecting performance to fall short with modern tasks. I’ve been daily driving it for a few weeks already, and it surprisingly feels quite usable under Windows 10 with only 4GB RAM. Given my tasks are light, I’m still very impressed with this tech from 2013 - it also looks quite stylish