Sony is to recall over half a million laptops of its CW and F series due to a potential overheat problem. This problem is due to a bug in the firmware of the Sony Vaio CW series and Sony Vaio F series laptops. Sony has released a new firmware update to fix this issue that results in overheating and deformation of the laptop casing.

Sony vaio comes preloaded with a utility called Vaio Smart Network, which controls the power status of the Wifi and Bluetooth radios. This is enabled only when the Wireless button on the laptop is turned on. So in order to turn on Bluetooth or Wireless, first slide the button on the front of the laptop towards the right hand side.

Now you can enable the Wireless or Bluetooth as shown in the screenshot below. The Wireless green icon is present in the task bar. (Right bottom of the screen) .

This video compares boot time of two sony vaio laptops. Sony Vaio E series versus the Sony Vaio CW series (VPCCW26FG vs VPCEB16FG).

Sony Vaio Battery Care Function utility is a sony vaio utility which helps improve battery performance by limiting maximum capacity to 80% of the full capacity.

Read more about Sony Vaio Battery care function in How to Enable Battery care function on Sony Vaio to improve Battery life.

Sony Vaio Battery care function increases your battery life time and battery back up in the long run by limiting the max capacity of the battery to 80% or 50%. This means the battery would only be charged to 80% in each charge-discharge cycle. The backup would be lower in the beginning, but in the long run average battery backup would be more. Thus the battery capacity is not utilized fully.

Battery life will be about 80% of the one of the fully charged battery, however, this mode prevents battery degradation and is more effective if you usually use the computer with battery power.

HDMI or High Definition Multimedia Input is a new technology to connect Multimedia devices like laptops, DVD Players and TVs. HDMI is capable of upto 10 Gbps transmission of High Definition Videosin Full HD Resolution (1080p). Unlike other ports that connect to screens like VGA, SVideo, the advantage of HDMI is that a single cable connection carries both the audio and video channels.

Extended display identification data (EDID) is a data structure provided by a computer display to describe its capabilities to a graphics card. It is what enables a modern personal computer to know what kind of monitor is connected. EDID is defined by a standard published by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). The EDID includes manufacturer name and serial number, product type, phosphor or filter type, timings supported by the display, display size, luminance data and (for digital displays only) pixel mapping data.

Out of the box Ubuntu 9.10 wireless/wifi did not work on my Sony Vaio CW Series (VPCCW26FG), The following error message is shown on start up and on dmesg command.

Could not read microcode: -2

The solution was to install backports modules.

Installing Wireless Drivers on Ubuntu

In order to make wireless (WiFi) work on the new Sony Vaio CW series, you have to run the following commands on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic.

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic

The default settings on my Sony Vaio CW Series laptop had wrong Gamma settings, therefore the color reproduction on the screen was slightly on the redish side.

The setting on the Display on Control Panel was not getting saved due to some reason (Windows 7). This issue can be resolved by changing the Gamma setting on the Nvidia Control Panel as shown highlighted in the image below. The Control Panel can be accessed from the desktop by Right-Click on the desktop.

The Sony Vaio CW Series (VPCCW26FG) Got Experience index of

5.8

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