SZ38GP / Vista Nervousness

I have a Vaio SZ38GP purchased in Hong Kong, I belive this is the same model as in the US, but I am not sure which model number it relates to?

I have received the Vista upgrade CD from Sony, but am a bit nervous to do the upgrade. I have searched the forums, but have a few questions:

1. How is battery life on the SZ series after the Vista upgrade? Is it severely degraded?

2. How is general use performance? Much slower?

I am quite hesitant to pull the trigger at the moment, I do need a clean install but with the amount I travel I would prefer not to take any risks. Any advise would be very appreciated.

 

No harm in trying you can always revert to factory setting. Backup your data first of course.

Vista has better memory access process and faster too at that regard. Boot time with Vista is longer but when loaded, faster than XP on application launch and more. With battery consumption, it's almost the same. if you are in "travel mode" , switch to stamina and change theme to windows basic rather than the Aero interface.

 

I have an Au based SZ38GP. I tried out Vista for a while, but then went back to XP.
Battery life is slightlyworse, but not something I would worry about. I bought another 1Gb of RAM to make it 2Gb all up and Vista was fine.For me, I had too many apps that I am using for work that didn't seem to be that compatible with Vista. File copy time also pissed me off... It is pretty though

If this was a home PC, I'd have stuck with Vista. Since it's a work PC, I went back to XP. Maybe when the apps I need to use gets Vista compliancy, I'll go back to it (SP1 maybe?)

 

hi dodgey. Well I bit the bullet and I'm running Vista now. It seems ok (less than 24 hours) aside from PCAnywhere not working (which is important for me). Im also concerned that I cant change the screen brightness.

What is everyone doing for 'readyboost'? It seems an expresscard is the best choice for this, no?

 

The ExpressCard may be a good choice, if you can get the Memory Card Adapter to work, that is.

For me, I'll go with SanDisk MS Pro Duo Extreme III 1 or 2 gb for now (18 MB/sec minimum transfer rate).

I also heard that Sony and SanDisk plan to release new Flash memory called "SxS" (s-by-s) aim for video recording on their camcorder with transfer rate of 800 Mbit/sec (about 100 MB/sec) using the ExpressCard Interface.

 

May I ask waht is "readyboost"?
It might be a dumb ass question.

 

its a new performance enhancing technology in vista. Its a pretty easy google from there

Kanthai - I cant believe I overlooked the MS Slot! I have an extra 1gb (albeit slower) card right here, problem solved! At least I can see if its worth using...

 

Glad it is all running well. I used the MS Slot for readyboost as well. I had a Sandisk 1Gb Pro Duo for readyboost. I didn't notice much difference between it on and off as I already had 2Gb RAM

The only issue I had was when I put in my Telstra OptionGT PCMCIA card in for my internet, my MS Slot becomes unavailable... Not too worried about it at the moment as I'm back to XP. Need to work to get paid

As for brightness on the screen, I downloaded the Intel drivers from the Intel site, and it seemed to be working for me...

 

Thanks! Got it, I just tried to use my SONY MS Duo 256MB in the MS Duo Slot and it works, I will try to get a bigger one and see if it helps on the performance.

 

The FN brightness controls have always worked fine for me with Vista ---- I did not download any drivers in addition to the ones provided on the upgrade DVD. I'll also note that I actually installed the upgrade twice ---- the second time happening from a system recovery. Went much better than the first round.

 

it will. i'm using 1Gb. and it's quite descent.

 

Which one are you using now? I m thinking of getting the SONY MS High Speed Pro Duo 2GB and wonder if the high speed card makes a difference, or should I go with a 4GB SONY MS Pro Duo (black color)

 

the latter would be nice! eitherway, i switched to Pro Dou 2GB and it's pretty ok after swapping my 1Gb. Anyway, readyboost is not used all the time, just in case you run out of main resource, it will fire. readyboost is just an enhance memory paging file. nothing very special.

 

since upgrading, my machine is really, really hot and the fan is blasting all the time. Any ideas why this is and how to fix it?