When Ed Bott first told me he wanted to get a look (so to speak) under the Sony Vaio’s hood, I have to admit, I sorta snickered. Not because I didn’t think it would be interesting, but because I was pretty sure the situation was so hopeless. He’s had a few days with it now and it turns out he’s making some impressive progress. So impressive that I might not be able to write snarky headlines like this one anymore! Highlights:
- Before shipping the machine off to me, Jeremy noted that he had wiped out Vista and installed Windows XP. Ironically, the machine with XP installed was practically unusable. (jt: yes, this I can attest to!)
- With a clean install of Vista Business and enough custom drivers to enable all installed hardware devices, the system was a rocket. Boot time to the logon screen was 33 seconds. (jt: zomg!)
- With that hardware and a clean copy of Vista, there’s no slowdown to be noted. (jt: wow!)
Ed will go into the nitty gritty of how he waded through the Sony murk and mire to accomplish this in a future post, but I do recommend reading his report so far. Especially the part where he’ll be talking to Sony reps, I’m very curious about their feedback.
Since I’ve never really talked about it, I wanted to clear up one potential misconception of “me vs Sony”. As I blogged about back in 2006, I loved my last Vaio. I told *the world* about my Vaio (literally, as that was the year I notched about 180K miles). I raved and raved. When someone wanted a reco, I said “buy-0 a Vaio” (not really, I’m not quite that corny). So when mine got stolen and I replaced it with the newer model it was as a previously very satisfied customer.
When you go from really loving something to finding its replacement utterly terrible (much like Crissy on Three’s Company), there’s a true feeling of betrayal. I am like a woman scorned, and plan to tell everyone in the world as such until I feel it’s been made right. Ed has very generously offered his time to do this “Vaio Speedup Challenge”, but frankly I feel that Sony “owes” me. Is that a fair feeling, probably not. I feel much of the same angst toward Microsoft right now, as a 15-year Windows veteran I am not happy with the fact that I felt I had no choice but to go Mac. It’s all a little irrational, but spending 8-16 hours a day with a computer over my career pretty much implies I’ve spent more waking hours with Windows than I have with my wife so far! That’s quite a relationship to burn.
Back to the topic at hand. I am very excited to see the new & improved Vaio. The Dell I’ve been checking out has performed very well (we had a minor snafu with a mouse we hooked up, but it turns out it was a negligible error that was fixable in minutes), and it’s refreshing to see a Vista experience that is leaps and bounds above what I’ve experienced so far. And huge thanks to Ed for taking the time to do this!!!
The fact that you had to send the laptop off and it had to be wiped just shows how much pain you may have to go through with a Vaio and Windows. Enjoy your Macbook, I know your out-of-box experience was probably much different.
My desktop PC is still too slow under Vista. A dedicated video card and a shot of memory should take care of it, but why must I invest more money in this Vista-certified computer that probably shouldn’t have been labeled as such? I hope MS doling out favors to Intel was worth it – a lot of the Vista negativity could have been avoided if they’d been honest about the performance requirements.
I heard about your plight on Ed Bott’s blog. The whole experience is intolerable. I wanted to say, I bought a mid level Dell (1420) which came with 0 junkware, 2 gigs of ram and 2.2 GHz Intel core 2 duo, The laptop had discrete video card and was spec’d identically to a Macbook Pro available at the time. The Dell was $900 cheaper out the door so I went with the Dell. I’ve had an excellent experience with the Dell and have not regretted the purchase one bit, Vista is now my operating system of choice, and sold off my last Mac, a Powerbook which was nice but ran out of storage, and is all but impossible for the home user to upgrade.
Vista does require more hardware than XP but XP required more than 98. With processing power and ram so cheap it doesn’t take much to have a good experience with Vista, but MS should have been more realistic with their requirements.