Upgrading a VAIO SE series

All,

Based on some great suggestions from this forum, I am leaning towards the purchase of a SONY VAIO SE Series VPCSE13FX/S Notebook. I have two questions regarding this machine:

1. The computer comes with a 5400 rpm hard drive and I would want to replace this with a 7200 rpm drive. Is this a fairly straight forward task? My current notebook is a barebones, so I am comfortable with the idea of opening up the machine.
2. I would want to replace the provided OS (Windows 7 Home Premium) with Windows 7 Professional. Are all of the necessary drivers and Sony-provided utilities available for download or am I likely to lose functionality if I make this change?

Thank you.

 

I own Sony Vaio SE 15 inch, but the basic is still held. You will be comfortable with doing the #1 because it is pretty much straight forward (I replaced HDD with my SSD easily). For #2, you can easily replace the Window without losing any functionality because Sony has all drivers available.

 

I have the VPCSE16FX/S, and I:

1. Replaced the OEM HDD with a 7200RPM drive: It wasn't quite as chimp-simple as it might be with a notebook that was designed with component upgrading in mind, but I found it to be pretty straightforward and likely more similar to upgrading a HDD in a desktop (i.e. a bit more involved than just popping the old out and the new in, but still not hard).

2. Upgraded the OEM version of WIN7: I had a boxed copy of WIN7 Ultimate, but used the Windows Anytime Upgrade functionality to upgrade from Home Premium. Very easy to do, as all you need is the product key for the upgraded version, and don't even need to insert any discs from what I remember. And, this did not affect the functionality of anything that had been previously installed on the machine.

Net-net is that both of these are easy to accomplish.

 

Thanks for the replies.

Tewill - your comments are interesting - I could clone the drive in the laptop to the new drive, then do the upgrade - might save some time/effort.

 

Hi Groston,

I did exactly what you want to do recently on my Sony Vaio SE.

I clean installed using my own Windows 7. Here is my experience so far:
1. Overall it went well with minor issues.
2. All drivers can be found from Sony support website.
3. Not all Sony software/utilities can be found from Sony support website, but they only be found from Sony recovery discs. So make sure to create the Sony recovery discs using Vaio Care before wiping out the original hard drive. For example, my version has PowerDVD pre-installed, and I found it in the recovery discs.
4. I have little issue where Sony Smart Network utility is missing Share My Network option after going through reinstall.

However, if you have options to use Windows anytime upgrade and happy with the current installation, I think that will be a better option.

ps. Does anyone know how to solve my issue #4 above? How to get the share my network option in Sony Smart Network? I installed the intel wifi driver prior to the Sony Smart Network.

 

That's what I did, with the addition that I cloned the drive right after initial WIN7 setup and before installing anything besides the cloning application.