Cingular SmartWi for Vista is garbage...

So I was really happy to have SmartWi working on Vista and the new Sidebar gadget was even cooler. All seemed to be well and then I realized it was too good to be true.

It's a piece of crap software. It takes up a ridiculous amount of memory just to be able to switch between WWAN/WLAN/BT. I think it's like 5 different processes or maybe more that take up >100mb of memory when they first load. It'll frequently expand to take up hundreds of MB of memory for no apparent reason.

Then there's the issue when you return from standby/hibernate that it will frequently crash when you try to use it. It crashed so frequently I had to create a special shortcut that restarted all the SmartWi processes so I didn't have to reboot everytime it crashed.

I still put up with it's BS until last night...I woke up and came to my laptop to find Windows Vista had terminated a bunch of apps because ThirdPartyAppMgr (one of the SmartWi processes) had taken up 2GB of RAM!!! In the end it was so out of control it crashed Kaspersky and other apps on my system.

That was the last straw...I uninstalled it, installed Wireless Switching Utility and life is good again. Maybe Sony will release an updated one, but the current one is a total piece of turd....be careful if you decide to use it.

 

This is puzzling; my SmartWi.exe uses 20,000 K, about the same as openoffice, much less than firefox, and ThirdPartyAppMgr uses about 13,000 K. I wonder if something else is going on. My system is fairly stable; once a day or so I will lose the WWAN connection, but it can be fixed by turning off the WWAN via the SmartWi interface, and then back on again, which I can live with, and it may have nothing to do with the program besides. I wonder if others have problems like yours.

 

I haven't tried installing Vista on my TX750P yet but your story sounds similar to mine. I used your clean install guide to reload the OS on my notebook without the bloatware. It worked great. A few months and many applications installations later I was trying to get my new Blackberry to connect to my notebook via Bluetooth. I figured I would update all the related apps from Sony's website. After doing so my SmartWi Utility completely failed. I uninstalled, reinstalled, no luck. I used other apps to clean it off the system, manually removed it from the registry and talked to Sony Support for a couple hours. They finally recommended I reinstall the OS from the recovery disks and not install the update from their site. I was totally stunned that their update hosed the otherwise functional application and their only solution was to start from scratch. Well done Sony!