After selling the previous Sony VAIO VGN-FW46M last year because it constantly broke and I got tired of constantly repairing it, I went for the Sony Vaio SVE1713Z1EB of 2013 which has an Intel i7 core, and USB 3.0, however it only has 1600×1900 HD Ready and it has absolutely brutally bad driver support for Windows 7 and 10. Any driver I have tried from AMD, the dedicated graphic unit inside will flicker, only the bare universal drivers will do a satisfactionary picture. Even if I disable automatic driver updates, Windows 10 won’t stop reinstalling a bad driver now and then!
1920 × 1080 pixels aka FULL HD just make more fun and it has a way better touchpad than the SV1713Z1EB which has this unibody touchpad with virtual buttons, *’yuck*!
As written in part 1 in 2016, the same upgrades have been done to this again including a 2nd hand display exchange, because the laptop came with a broken one (yes, this particular model is hard to come by, so even with a broken screen I took the chance and got it!).
As you can see the screen has a tiny dent in the middle of the right hand side of the screen, hence it was a bit cheaper. I bought it from an UK Recycling company, so rescued another screen and laptop from the waste dumps!
As I had to take the whole computer apart anyway, I decided to take the chance and replace the internal N draft wireless & bluetooth mini PCI-E with a Realtek RTL8821AE 433Mbps 802.11ac WiFi BT 4.0 Wireless Mini PCI-E Wlan Card
(It’s important to use the Realtek one, the Intel AC & BT4.0 card has no proper Windows 10 64bit driver support!). (They are some officially but the driver disconnects the card randomly without reason).
Also I have decided to be smarter than last time and not buying official Sony Vaio FW certificated RAM, instead I checked with RAM’s specs that are inside (2 x 2 GB Hynix PC2-6400S 200Pin DDR2 800Mhz Laptop SO-DIMM NON-ECC RAM” and went to buy 2 of
“Hynix4GB 2Rx8 PC2-6400S 200Pin DDR2 800Mhz Laptop SO-DIMM NON-ECC RAM”
The laptop is very picky and just buying random DDR 2 SO-DIMM will result in the laptop crashing during operation!
As I assumed back then, this unit came with a ” MATASHITA BD-MLT UJ230A” (my previous one had an “AS” inside), the specs are almost identical, so this is good enough to stay.
Only downer is a bit that the media panel won’t close even to the keyboard anymore, as the cables are a bit shorter now due to slight layout differences in the new WLAN mini PCI-e card, so I cannot re-route the antenna cables properly over the button field.
Anyway, good to see this 11 years old laptop model upgraded and to new speeds! 🙂