Vaio/Vista System Recovery: it woix!

Quickie post here, but I did a full system recovery this past weekend, and now appear to have a working computer. Of course, the initial reaction you should have is: it completely sucks that one would have to do a system recovery just to get their brand new computer working properly!

For those doing their research, I unfortunately can’t recommend Vaios anymore. Maybe this’ll change down the road, but it’s simply ridiculous that the out of box experience I had was so terrible. Granted I’m a power-user and I probably tried doing too many things simultaneously during the first-time setup, but if that’s enough to mess it up, it shouldn’t have given me that much control.

That behind me, I will say that *this* version of my VGN-SZ460N laptop seems to work pretty darn well. I’ve disabled Aero, but otherwise Vista is cranking away. For now.

The restore process I used:

1. Triple-redundancy backup (yup, 3 different storage locations) for all my Photos, Videos, and Documents. Also copied my bookmarks, my Outlook.pst file, and took screenshots of my email account settings for fast replication.
2. Had a shot of whiskey then clicked on the System Recovery option built-into the laptop.
3. Paced nervously for an hour, trying to remember what I might have forgotten to backup.
4. Watched the restore happen, with only 2 “scary” dialogs during the process wherein Vista informed me it might have had trouble with two of the installs. I chose to ignore them.
5. Logged into my fresh Vista configuration.
6. Restored all my stuff

And that was last night, so I’ve had almost a full day of productivity already, and everything is much, much better.

At the end of the day, however, Apple doesn’t need the iPhone to convince people like me about the desktop. Companies like Sony and Microsoft are doing their work for them.