New SZs only come with Vista, now I have the buyer's remorse...

I haven't received my new SZ450N/C yet, but I put the downpayment for it yesterday at my local Sony Store. Now I'm worried that I won't want to run Windows Vista. I checked at most of the vendors of my software and external hardware and found "Vista not officially supported".

Anyway, has anyone else had this experience? Is there any way to get Sony to set up the computer with Windows XP instead of Vista? I'm sure that I'll be glad to upgrade to Vista in about a year, but for right now I just want my computer to work properly!

If only I'd bought a couple of months earlier, it would have come with XP installed and the only the option to upgrade to Vista!

Any ideas? (... Or perhaps I should just stop panicking
- Cliff

 

Vista right now is too buggy. I'd buy a copy of XP Professional or something -- forget Vista until everything has been worked out. Thankfully I got my FE before they released Vista on their new machines -- which is exactly why I got the FE when I did.

 

Yeargh! I just made this case with some Sony tech support guy in their online chat and he basically kept responding with "Sony does not authorize or support the installtion of older operating systems on your computer". I kinda got the sense that I may have been talking to a computer instead of a human...

OK, so I don't even have my computer yet and I'm already getting a taste of the infamous Sony support...

 

It is illegal to deny warranty because you're running a different OS than the laptop was sold with. I think the law was called something like Morrison law...it started in the auto industry and basically includes everything now.

 

Well that may be, but judging by the way Sony treats its customers, something tells me that they don't really care about that particular law.

It does seem strange though that Vista has only been out for about a month and I no longer have the choice of OSes that I can get with my new computer! I remember back when Windows 95 was released (dating myself here , we had the option to choose between 3.1 or 95 when buying a new computer for quite a while afterwards. Ditto going from 2000 to XP. In both of those cases, I choose to stay with the older OS until the bugs of the new one were worked out and was happier for it.

 

You're making it out to be a lot worse than it is. When you get your SZ450, use Vista's partition editor to create another partition. Then buy a copy of XP SP2 (Newegg.com is cheap) and install it onto that 2nd partition. This will give you dual-boot in that you can use either Vista or XP whenever you feel like it. It also will allow you to migrate to Vista as more hardware/vendors support it.

Also for what it's worth most hardware/software that's compatibile for XP (not officially Vista) runs without an issue for me. XP drivers work fine 99% of the time and XP software runs great - if anything Vista has a compatibility mode that helps make XP software work.

Why don't you wait until you get your laptop, try to get your hardware/software working and then figure out what you need to do????

 

I believe not too long ago someone post a thread about installing Win XP on a SZ450N/C for his/her boss. You may want to look up that thread & check:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=102873&highlight=install+sz450

By the way, this is slightly off topic & I'm just curious. Is it even possible to "mod" the drivers installation files of the SZ3 series to install onto the SZ4 series if running on Win XP?

 

Wow! I didn't realize that Sony was making it so hard for SZ4 series users to install XP on their systems! I guess I'll just wait for my new computer to show up, use the installed Vista and keep my fingers crossed...

Thanks for all the help!

 

Well, Sony hasn't said anything about denying warranty. The SZ4XX series is sold with Windows Vista and, as such, will only receive support for Vista-related issues. If you chose to install XP on the machine, and then sent the comptuer into Sony for repair (for example), they'd probably end up re-imaging your harddrive (standard Sony practice) and you'd get it back with factory Vista settings all in place.

Makes sense to me. I don't think you can fault Sony for this decision.

And, on another note, I imagine that Vista will run just fine for you. Internet forums (this one included! OMG!) are filled with a lot of doom-sayers, and typically draw posts from people having trouble with their machines, customer service, etc etc etc. It just doesn't make sense to join a forum and make a post stating: "Today I didn't have any problems with my computer."

So yeah, I'd just take a deep breath. Everything will be a-okay!

 

Follow-up: I'd note that I've had some very positive experiences with Sony customer service. There have been occasional posts on this forum that report that Sony ranks up very high on consumer reports, uhm, reports in terms of customer service and satisfaction.

Dealing with any customer service group has its frustrations, in my experience.

 

My reply was not really based on first-hand experience with Sony support. Other than the automatron that "spoke with" during my internet chat this morning, I have no other experience with Sony support. That said, I admit that I was a little nervous about buying this notebook after reading nearly universal condemnation of Sony's customer support on these forums, but I respect the company for making quality products (currently looking at a wonderful Sony 24" LCD as I type) and hope that this notebook will be another good one.

Thanks for your response! It's nice to hear someone arguing "the other side" of the Sony customer service discussion.

 

It's essentially the same hardware except the camera so I don't know why you couldn't just install the XP drivers. You'd have to use the model.txt trick discussed in the forums but should work fine.

 

No doubt about it, Sony support stinks. On the other had they make great hardware. I just got the SZ450N/C and it runs beautifully. Did not have sound at one point, but that just involved uninstalling the driver and then that worked.

I did upgrade to Ultimate (at $139, which was very upsetting that I had to go through the expense and hassle and the “we do not support it” even if Sony and Microsoft sold it to me (it is already on the hard drive)) and that had some issues for another posting.

As to Vista, be glad you got it factory installed. This will save you the upgrade hassles later on, which you would eventually do anyway. Vista is better, even if there are some teething pains.

 

Ok. So the main thing for the SZ4 series users to use XP & install the SZ drivers (meant for XP) is just to use the model.txt trick & everything will be fine?

By the way, before reading your post, I didn't realize that the camera are "different" for the SZ3 & SZ4 series.... Mind if I ask what is the difference between them, if any?

 

No clue but they are different models...SZ3 have VCC2 and SZ4 have VCC5 I believe. I haven't tried using VCC5 drivers for my VCC2 and I doubt it'll work either way.

 

I was in the same boat u are my friend. I spent one month researching about Vista, its compatibilities and what will and wont work before I ended up buying my Vaio AR320 cpu w/ Vista Home Premium Pre-installed.

Let me tell you. After downloading all the available drivers off the sony support site and installing the programs i use daily (pokerstars, winamp, aim, infranview, Sony Acid, & more), everything worked perfectly and all these reports of people saying "Its buggy" or "its totally unstable" is total BS. I have never had a lock-up, blue screen or a program saying that its incompatible. Everything works great and much quicker than it did w/ XP.

Dont worry! Everything will be fine and you'll be laughing about it in the long run. Enjoy your new PC dude.

 

hmmm... in the past with MS operating systems you always had to install the older operating system first in order to get the boot menu. Has this changed with vista? Can you actually have Vista on first and then load xp and get the boot menu?

Jerz

 

Buggy? I guess it depends on what you're running on Vista. I've noticed a lot of incompatiblities with some line of business software and have notice there is a huge learning curve to figure out the networking side of things as compared to XP but i haven't noticed much bugginess with the latest release but then again I don't use it YET on a day to day basis... I guess I'll find out here in the next couple of weeks.

You're right though I'd probably suggest XP to anyone who doesn't feel up to the task of learning something new and figuring out the quirkiness of this new bloated OS.

Jerz

 

I posted on this topic as I returned a SZ 420N to Sony. Installing XP as second boot was really to much of a chore...I was partially successfull but was not able to find a few remaining drivers and I think that for the price, the notebook should be fully functionnal.

Can someone elaborate on the model.txt trick as I tried fooling the installer by editing that file but had no success.

Sony's service...Impeccable...I had full credit when returning the unit.

 

I called Sony and the support lady said that you can do whatever you want in terms of software, it doesn't void the warrenty. I suggest you do the same, and ask for a reference number when you're done just in case.

 

Why don't you wait until he gets back, run sysprep on his old hard drive, and install the old drive into the new Sony

 

The thing that bothers me the most is not having a choice.

I'm buying this computer largely because I want to be faster than my old notebook. I know that this VAIO would be gloriously fast with XP (as a habit I turn all visual themes off and maximize performance as much as possible) but now I'm worried that all of my new extra processing power and memory are going to be wasted Vista's bloated OS and its eyecandy and my InDesign and Photoshop programs are going to run as slow as ever...

However, like I said in a previous post, I don't have the computer yet so I think I'll just take everyone's advice and try using Vista for a while to see how I like it. Who knows, maybe SuperFetch and ReadyBoost will actually speed everything up for me and in the end I'll love Vista... (fingers crossed)

Thanks for all the tips! And if I have to installed XP again, it's good to know that there are some forums on here that can help me do that.