VGN-AR21S Purchase experience

[Sirnig]

I have just made my first VAIO purchase of the AR21S having come from a 5 year-old Dell Inspiron 8000 which was very reliable but now almost state-of-the-ark.
My first AR21S bought fom John Lewis was returned for a refund within 3 days due to dead pixels, a dim right-side of the screen and excessive light-bleed along the bottom of the screen; I also suspect it had a faulty blu-ray drive as it made a rough mechanical noise on each boot-up. The return experience with John Lewis was superb (no, I have no connection with them other than as a (now) satisfied customer!)...no quibble, pleasant, polite and unlike most/all other retailers they give you 28 days from purchase to make a return. Despite this poor first showing from Sony, I still liked the machine enough to persevere and I ordered up another from JL. This time, the AR21S screen was perfect as was the disc drive...in fact it seemed like a different model such was the difference between the two. After loading up the 2 x 100GB drives with personal software I then discovered to my horror that in Win Media Center there was no connection to the installed AverMedia TV Freeview/Analogue Tuner card...the WMC menu had a listing for My TV but it reported no Tuner was installed. Checking Device Manager in XP told me the opposite...the card was there and the drivers were properly installed. I could not find a way to get the two to communicate. I ended up rolling the system back using the hidden partition on the VAIORecovery Suite, thereby hosing 3 days of instal work. However, this did the trick and the software hooked up with the hardware TV card at last. So far, it's working well and picture/recording quality is superb.
It is a pity that the fantastic quality of this AR21S machine is let-down by poor quality control from Sony before these machines leave the factory.
I am also disappointed Sony do not supply any installation discs whatsoever for the installed software which makes problem-solving all the more difficult for their customers. Note also that unlike the previous CoreDuo AR11S, there is no HDMI cable supplied with this machine( come on Sony, this is a bit mean on a £2000 machine!).
Summing up, not a great showing from Sony's QC but the AR21S is a truly superb machine once you find a perfect one or manage to get it the way it should have been in the first place.

[Dekesh]

i have an AR11M and I had the TV tuner problem in Media Centre. Its to do with one of the windows updates that causes it to mess up. so u didn't need to do a recovery. simply uninstalling the relevant update would have fixed it. the actual update that causes the problem is "Update Rollup for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (KB919803)" so incase anybody has this problem in the future they do not need to do a recovery.

[Sirnig]

i have an AR11M and I had the TV tuner problem in Media Centre. Its to do with one of the windows updates that causes it to mess up. so u didn't need to do a recovery. simply uninstalling the relevant update would have fixed it. the actual update that causes the problem is "Update Rollup for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (KB919803)" so incase anybody has this problem in the future they do not need to do a recovery.

Interesting point, Dekesh but I doubt it was the true cause of my problem with the TV as I immediately downloaded and installed the same set of MS XP patches after I restored the drive using the Recovery Program and this time the My TV menu came into view and allowed me to enter the setup menus for it, whereas before restore it was reporting no tuner card present...if the patch had been the cause of the trouble it would surely have hosed the TV connection again. I am still of the view that the MCE software was not properly installed by Sony before it left the factory.

[Dekesh]

possible but i have tried installing the update i mentioned earlier but it still doesn't work. as soon as i uninstall it and try it then it works without a problem. maybe it might be to do with the pre-installed version from sony...maybe not. could be anything i guess

[mrjingles-suzuki]

Hello
Just bought the AR21S and hopefully you know if you have had the same problems.
Is it normal for the nvidia graphics card to buzz and click? I thought it was the hard drive, but now i think it is the graphics card. Moving a window or resizing the window results in a buzzing noise coming from underneath the keyboard. The clicking is a permanent low level noise that is driving me mad.
Anybody know what do do, except live with it or wear headphones.

[Sirnig]

Hello
Just bought the AR21S and hopefully you know if you have had the same problems.
Is it normal for the nvidia graphics card to buzz and click? I thought it was the hard drive, but now i think it is the graphics card. Moving a window or resizing the window results in a buzzing noise coming from underneath the keyboard. The clicking is a permanent low level noise that is driving me mad.
Anybody know what do do, except live with it or wear headphones.

Sorry to learn of your problems, mrjingles. There is no "buzz" off my machine...the only sound coming off it when working is the very quiet sound of the fan (the speed varies but it is barely noticeable) and the 2 hard drives (you can hear the quiet sound of the platters spinning and the occassional feint click of the heads). To minimise the hard drive activity when idle I have disabled indexing on both drives [ click on My Computer> select Drive C> right-click on it and select Properties and UNcheck the box at the foot of the general page where it says "Allow Indexing Service for fast searching"...this is a useless resource hog and needless exercise routine for the hard drives on a machine of this capability. Credit for this tip is due to www.tweakhound.com...a great site for common-sense tips and tricks to optimize XP. I suggest also using the XP Defragmenter program to optimise the file layout on the drives...it's listed under Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter]. It seems to me that if your'e getting an electrical buzzing sound off your machine then it is probably faulty and perhaps should be returned to the retailer asap...check out the DTI website for your consumer rights...you may need to forcibly remind the retailer of their legal obligations.

[Sirnig]

Another further update on using my new AR21S:-

Mysteriously, after changing from the AverMedia M115S analogue to the Freeview tuner, I "lost" all connection again with the TV Tuner card which MCE reported as either being faulty or not installed [this was different to the first problem described above when out-of-the-box there was no listing whatsoever for either Live or Recorded TV on the menu for MyTV].

Happily, after 8hrs+ of getting nowhere I stumbled upon the solution at the webblog of Aaron Stebner at http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/02/17/534559.aspx
in which he says:-
"Troubleshooting steps I use for Media Center component registration failure errors

I heard from a customer this week who indicated they were seeing all of the following errors that I have described in previous blog posts:
A Component Registration Failure error appears while trying to navigate to My TV. The text of the error message states "Some of the files needed to play radio or video are missing or corrupt. Media Center component registration may have failed."
A Critical Process Failure error appears while trying to configure an internet connection during first run. The text of the error message states "A critical Media Center process has unexpectedly failed. If problems persist, please restart your machine and try again, or contact technical support. Code: 3"
A Tuner Not Found error appears while trying to setup a TV signal during first run."
He suggests first a look at the MCE logfile in C:\WINDOWS\medctroc.log which invariably shows up error messages. His solution is as follows:-
" Close Media Center
Click on the Start menu, choose run and type cmd
Execute the command regsvr32.exe atl.dll
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehSched /unregServer
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehSched /service
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRecvr /unregServer
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRecvr /service
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRec.exe /unregServer
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRec.exe /regserver
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehmsas.exe /unregServer
Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehmsas.exe /regserver
Restart Media Center

The command lines above are case-sensitive, so make sure to capitalize the S in unregServer exactly as listed above."

Note carefully the space before each final / on each command, otherwise the command will not be recognised.

The above worked first time for me after I re-installed the latest current Hotfix KB925766 (23/10/2006) and I hope it is useful to others with the same frustating problem. Nice work Aaron!

[Sirnig]

Following on my last post above, I have written a fuller expanded post entitled "MCE 2005 "No Tuner Found" etc" under the "Solutions" section of this Forum, drawing attention to a program called "MceRepair_0.2" written by Peter Rosser which apparently cures most if not all of the ills of Windows Media Center 2005 hotfix and patch installations. See his site at :-
http://blogs.msdn.com/peterrosser/archive/2005/10/20/482974.aspx

[Sirnig]

Another update to my original post:

See here http://www.club-vaio.com/clubvaio/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=36924
where I detail how the connection to the supplied Sony IR Remote Commander RC6 "got lost" and how I had to re-enable it using the MS Hotfix KB905213 download. There may be other solutions but this was the only one which worked first time for me after several frustrating hours of going nowhere.

When this machine works properly it is a dream come true...fast, slick and a drop-dead gorgeous 1920 x 1200 pixel screen to stare at open-mouthed due to its rich, bright colours. Shame on you, Sony, for setting this up with a default desktop wallpaper of unbelievably crappy quality...in future, try using some of the much much better quality (i.e. sharper, more colourful) backgrounds on your own Users Forum.

I've run an informal speed test on the Core2Duo chipset using "SuperPi" which returned a score of 64secs calculating pi to 2 Million decimal places...quite a difference to the 5mins 34 secs on my old Dell Pentium III...smokin' (metaphorically, not literally!) as they say.

[kee-lo_]

Wouldn't purchase a PC until vista is out, or you're really needing one.