SZ780 Vista Ultimate Reformat

So I ordered a SZ780 and from reading all the comments about bloatware, I picked up a copy of Vista Ultimate also.

I dont have experience with reformating a laptop so if anyone could help give a dummys guide to reformatting the SZ780 series with details on how to find and install all the drivers etc., then it would be really helpful!

Also I think the hard drive, 250gigs, comes with a hidden partition for vista business, should I wipe this out also? and if so how do I find and reformat this partition?

On a side note, how many hours of battery life would the large capacity battery give?

 

As soon as you receive your laptop run the Sony Recovery Tool (not sure of exact name). You'll see an option to "Create Recovery Discs" in the left hand pane. You'll need 2x 4.7GB DVDs or 1 DL-DVD.

Once the recovery discs have been created you can start to delete/resize partitions etc. The recovery discs give you the option to recreate any deleted recovery paritions and return the laptop back to the state it was in when you received it.

Once the above it done you need to decide how you want your HDD partitioned. If you want to leave it as one hiuge 250GB partition then just insert the Vista install DVD and during setup delete existing partitions and create a new one.

My advice would be to create atleast 3.
30GB Primary C:\Vista
150GB Extended D:\Media (Documents, Music, Pictures & Videos)
???GB Extended E:\Temp (Downloads etc)

Vista has a neat feature where you can right-click on your personal folders and relocate them. This is the first thing I do. It means however many times I reinstall Vista I don't need to touch my Media and Temp partitions. Also makes backups a lot easier.

OK, so you want to create 3 partitions as above. You'll need a disk partitioning tool like Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director. If you don't have one to hand a Linux Live CD (e.g. Ubuntu) includes a partitioning utility.

Finally once Vista is installed you'll find most of the hardware isn't recognised and you need to install drivers. You can get most from VAIO-link but if you wait day I'll upload my collection. I receive a SZ7 this week and am in the process of installing Vista on it right now. Once I've tested and organised my downloaded drivers & utilities I'll upload them in an archive.

Vista makes installing drivers easy. With all the drivers in say c:\SZ_Drivers you can open up Device Manager and then click through each hardare item and select "Update Driver Software". Then select the root of the drivers folder c:\SZ_Drivers and Vista scans the sub-folders. Not all devices need drivers but if a newer one exists it will be updated.

Once drivers are installed and updated you have to install some Sony utils. Not all the included utils are needed, just the basic utils to get the volume, brightness and hardware buttons working.

If you have a read of my thread linked in the signature you'll see the utils and the order they need to be installed in. The guide was written before the SZ7 and Vista SP1 so is a little outdated now. Plus MS have just this week taken down the links to the Vista DVD image.

 

I just got home and heres opened the box, messing with lappy right now, thanks for the guide!

 

FYI - actually the links to the Vista ISO files are back up! I dl'ed a clean 32-bit copy and burned it last night.