Sony VAIO sucks!
Oh my God! It's my fifth time reinstalling Windows XP on a Sony VAIO that just got released (VGN-TX770P). When I received the laptop it had so much crap on it (such as AOL, various Sony utilities & trial versions of Norton, MS Office, Anti-spyware, etc) that I decided to wipe out the system and install clean Windows XP Pro. Guess what...wireless drivers including cingular adapter for this stupid laptop were not present on Sony's support website. I called Sony and they told me that I had to run a restore procedure from their restore DVD, which by the way, doesn't even come with the laptop. So, I ended up purchasing their restore DVD for twenty something bucks including shipping. I received the DVD in about a week, booted up from it and let it reimage the machine to the factory default. Took me about an hour to uninstall all the Sony's crap and I thought everything was back to normal. As soon as I rebooted the machine, Cingular wireless stopped working! I went to Sony's support site again to see if there were any driver updates and everything is now available for download! Aghhh...
Oh well, I thought, screw Sony with their support and started downloading the drivers from the website. Reinstalled Windows XP, went through all drivers just like it was instructed on their support page, step by step. Everything seemed to be OK, except when I rebooted the machine all of a sudden it started freezing. CTRL+ALT+DEL -> Task Manager showed "smartwifi.exe" eating up 99% CPU time. Reinstalled all of the drivers from scratch, reboot - same thing. OK, I thought, maybe I screwed up a step during driver installation and did something wrong. Reinstalled OS again, installed drivers and damn it! The same darn thing - the process was eating up 99% of CPU. Called Sony support. As usual, an idiot technician picks up. Makes me change the process priority (duh)...tries a couple of different things and puts me on hold. After about 30 minutes of making me listen to stupid music on hold, picks up and tells me that my configuration is not supported by Sony because it's not Sony's image. I got mad and simply hung up.
After all unsuccessful customizations I decided to go back to Sony's image. I had to wait for three goddamn hours for the imaging to complete on it. And guess what - right after the imaging was done I got another error from Sony's connection utility. I'm extremely mad and frustrated about this laptop right now and I'm ready to send it back. Sony sucks, their software sucks, their hardware sucks. It's almost like in the old days when I hated Microsoft for their Windows 95, I hate Sony for their VAIO laptops.
Read Part 2 here
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