Sometime last week I had come to the conclusion that either my new Vaio VGN-SZ460N is a lemon, or Vista is utterly terrible, or somewhere in between. On Monday night while talking to Michael Gartenberg (who’s spent more time with Vista and Vaios and everything else known to man and computing), he concurred that while Sony isn’t exactly known for high quality drivers, my experiences were, in a word, subpar.
By the way – iPhone.
After hearing enough Apple Geniuses stories (with the exception apparently of when you just walk into the store and try to buy a computer, at which point they no longer retain ‘genius’ status in my eyes, but I digress), yesterday I decided I’d put Sony to the task. Called support, held, held, held, held more, held, talked to someone, escalated, held, held, escalated, held, got on the phone with a specialist. Ahh. Specialist.
This guy (coincidentally named Jeremy – sweet) really did have a good grasp on the situation. Didn’t try to duck and cover. Didn’t have me waste time with a defrag or other clearly unnecessary step. His hunch was one of the following issues:
- Bad motherboard
- Bad RAM
- Bad Vista load
After some diagnostics last night, it’s apparently not the RAM. And while it could be the motherboard, I don’t really want to wait the 7-10 days, nor pay $150 for on-site support. Supposedly some SonyStyle stores will get their own geniuses too sooner or later, but I’m not one for patience. So reloading Vista is the path I’ll try – I actually did have a quirky bootup the first time I turned on the PC, which apparently can knock the self-install for a loop, so hopefully that’s all the fix I need.
So, I’m doing my backup to my Drobo right now, and will follow up with a full System Recovery later this morning.
ps – The reason I wrote ‘iPhone’ above is apparently Congress recently passed a law that stated all blog posts made in the month of June must in some way reference the iPhone. Didn’t want to get in trouble…
I’ve not been a fan of Sony laptops. A few years ago when I was in the market for my notebook, I went on their forums, and I was surprised at how many issues they had. Tech support even apparently told one guy to buy a new laptop even though his was less than two years old! It sounds like you’re doing better than that, best of luck sorting this out.
–Jonas