Vaio + Vista = $2800 heart attack in a box

I bought an (allegedly) top of the line Vaio AR370 about five months ago, and it has been an unmitigated disaster to my multimedia business. I work as an international multimedia consultant, helping my clients in emerging nations choose their technology solutions, and I had hoped to be able to show them the wonders & glory of the latest tech. Instead, I have been thwarted at every turn. My big expensive Sony is now back at the repair shop - the internal RAID hard drive that was supposed to allow me to do field editing in HD reported that it was crashing and that I should back up all my data. Sony sent techs to my house TWICE to replace the hard drive - the second time with full replacement of the memory as well - only to find that the brand spanking new hard drives they were trying to install wouldn't work either.

The Sony tech himself had to call tech support, and he still couldn't get Sony equipment to work with Sony equipment - the Vista OS would not allow the new hard drives to format themselves, and crashed the whole system repeatedly. The hard drives fried to a crisp.

Thus, I have had to crate up my computer, which I paid $2800 for and ship it back to Sony for weeks and weeks. I have lost every bit of work on my hard drive because of Vista's shutdown of large file backups (apparently, the OS suspects that if you're trying to move gigs of data, you MUST be pirating a movie or some such, and it shuts down the process and gives you the Blue Screen of Death).

I have been unable to work with any of my existing media files because of the DRM. I think that the combination of Vista and Sony hardware is particularly toxic; Sony has been so freaked out by the way that the illegal downloading has cored out its music business that they have put their hardware divisions into a vise to try to make sure that users have no way to use their Sony machines to pirate content. I'm not sure what happened in those board meetings - maybe the software-side guys strangled bunnies to intimidate the hardware guys ... whatever they did, it worked.

Of course, what this means in the real world is that Sony hardware has been so badly crippled as to be useless. The Vaio computer line equipped with Vista spends so much of its time and effort atempting to police your conduct that there are very few clock cycles left to actually accomplish whatever tasks you set it - for example, despite running on a dual-dual core setup, my Vista machine is slower than my '02 vintage 2.53 Ghz machine running XP. That's the kind of performance hit that professionals just cannot take - and in this, case WILL NOT take. I can't justify advising my clients to pay $2-3K for workstations that perform more poorly than their existing aging infrastructure.

That's not even to get into all the files that simply won't play or even open on a Vista machine, because the default position that Vista+Vaio take is that your content must be pirated unless the OS is told otherwise. Thus, a movie that I wrote, produced, directed and edited is assumed to be stolen!

I am hoping that when (or if) I ever get my Sony back from the repair center, it will work. But the constant inability to do any work with multimedia, the incompatibility with external peripherals, the inability to display HD content on an exterior monitor, the sluggish performance and the unjustifiable cost have made me the greatest unintentional Mac salesman in history...

 

sony = junk

their stuff is over hyped and their quality have gone down over the years

 

I would've thought you would go with Mac 'cause that's their biggest selling point. That their computers do better with multimedia then PCs.

 

uh are you asking for a new recommendation?

 

Because of this, I wouldn't be swayed towards Mac altogether, just another PC brand most likely. Of course, I don't care much for Macs anyways, never used them and I don't care. You should still give PC's a chance.

 

LOL. I say you don't go for Name Brand stuff, but purchase a laptop of ODM's. Such as Clevo, Sager, Compal, Asus, etc.

 

You assume that just because you get BSODs when moving large amounts of data that DRM is to blame when you have no evidence otherwise, and then fault all Sony VAIOs for being "crippled" because of it. How does this make sense?

 

Love the thread title!

 

I have a VAIO and I have no problem at all, and i bought mine like maybe 3-4 months ago. What does that tell ya?

 

xFr3nLixPhYr3x, I totally agree.

Read my signature.

 

The default install on a Sony Vaio has tons of craplets installed. I don't think it's done maliciously, but all the junk installed definitely slows down the system.

If you reinstall Vista from a clean install disk, things will be much faster. (You'll have to install all the relevant drivers and it's a lot of extra work you shouldn't have to do.)

 

I wouldn't trust any mission critical work with Vista. That is probably your biggest problem at the moment. If you want to use Vista I would suggest doing it via dual boot or run it virtualized with XP at the primary OS. Until Vista SP1 comes out I wouldn't suggest using Vista other than casual use. There is a very good reason why the major corporations are not adopting Vista.

 

i have a good friend with the AR290 with raid and his is flawless.

 

I find some of the assertions of the poster to be unbelievable. It is true that Sony adds additional DRM features to their machines, but these are limited to supporting the Magic Gate memory stick and the software may be removed. There is also a lot of other junk on the machine used for playback of their proprietary video formats, also removable.

IMO the problem seems to be from trying to make an unusual hardware setup, raid on a notebook, work with Vista. That is a real problem and something that should have been solved before the machine left the factory. Its most likely a driver issue. Vista seems to run great on some systems and miserably on others, accounting for the widely varying reviews.