Vista on the SZ, My Take

Yes, you can install Vista on a SZ3xx and get nearly everything working right. There are minor issues, especially with the camera not appearing where it is supposed to. I would have to say getting Vista running on a complex machine like the SZ is easier than with XP. The transparent window borders are attractive.

But what about Vista itself? To me it seems to run very slow. Things like populating icons in the control panel, opening My Computer or removing a windows component take longer. A virus scan of all partitions using the exact same Vista/XP compatible AV took 22 minutes from Vista and 17 from XP on a dual boot machine. More clicks to get to most of the settings boxes. Large fonts seem to be limited to DPI adjustments which also make icons and the start menu too large. The fonts just seem too small on the 13.3" display which has never been a problem in XP. Light blue type that is hard to read.

Ever get a message a driver did not install properly and then you ran it again after checking the run with proper settings option? After that the install program for the driver never runs again. All those buggy driver installation packages might not be totally Sony's fault.

How does your software run? I did not try everything, but Winrar required a user access control pass every time it ran. Eraser does not work with the recycle bin. There are probably lots more, but I gave up. There is no support for my infrared to usb dongle, and there may never be.

I did not run a definitive battery life benchmark, but it seems to drain down much faster than XP. Others around here report the same.

Slightly OT, but on my desktop with a Nforce 4 MB, there is no wake up from S3 sleep and no fix, only workarounds.

A great new OS, such a deal.

-Ron

 

reviewing a new operating system before the bugs are fixed is kind of silly IMO. I believe microsoft will be releasing service pack 1 within the month, don't quote me on that though.

 

On my SZ160 with 1GB of ram Vista runs beautifully, I don't find any of these lags you mention. Did you clean install or upgrade?

 

For me Vista works perfect. Much stable than XP. I feel even faster than XP. In my case, I have 3gb memory on my SZ. Maybe, this is why.

 

Update:

I reinstalled everything. That got rid of a nasty BSOD when I switched back from XP to Vista. I don't know what fixed it, but I installed the EU bios update and used the Intel chip set inf package and the Sony driver for the 945GM video this time.

One good thing about all of this is that a lot of stuff works with XP such as the new fingerprint reader driver and the bios update.

Virus scanning times are more equivalent now. 17 minutes in XP vs 18.5 minutes in Vista. I turned off Windows Defender in Vista. That helped a lot.

Some things just look blurry. Perhaps it is the enlargement of all screen objects caused by using the 120 dpi fonts.

I did a battery life check this evening. I made it 2 hours and 5 minutes until a 10% warning was issued. That was with the computer mostly doing nothing. Every couple of minutes I moved the mouse to keep it alive. Perhaps there was 20 minutes of light web surfing in there. With XP I can get about 3 hours of heavy web surfing.

I am starting to think that the reason there is no camera driver is that Sony might be having a problem with the manufacturer of the camera. Just a guess.

There is no doubt in my mind that Vista is slower than XP. Things that used to be instantaneous now have small delays.

-Ron

Edited to remove mention of sidebar, solution found.

 

I did a battery test with XP under conditions as much the same as possible as I did with Vista. To reach 10% of battery life 2:05 with Vista, 2:48 with XP. If that does not get your attention, I don't know what will.

 

FYI...you can use the XP drivers for the Sony camera in Vista - they work perfectly fine. As do others like the Built-in MS reader, Alps Touchpad, etc.

 

I am thinking about installing it on my SZ360, but from what I have been reading, I will wait for a while maybe until SP1 is released.

 

The XP camera driver works to the extent that an image is displayed in the Sony camera capture applet. There is no camera in "My Computer" or "Cameras and Scanners", strangely. I did not have any other applications to test the camera with.

For me battery life is the real show stopper, but application compatibility problems don't help Vista's cause any. I may try again when SP1 comes out, if I don't by a Mac by then.

 

I don't understand that mentality - you're complaining about compatibility with current apps and accessories you use so you'll buy a Mac which is 100% incompatible??

 

I'm sorry, but app compatibility isn't MS' fault or Sony's for that matter. Vendors have had at least a year - if not more - to patch or release Vista-compatible software. It has been RTM since November, giving these manufacturers an additional 3 months before it hits consumers to get it finished.

The same thing happened from 98 to XP, and now XP to Vista.

Do you think Mac users were happy in the 7/8/9 switch to OS X? That was way worse.

And if you have hardware that didn't get a driver, it's not MS' responsibility to write one. Some vendors are seeing it as a way to phase out support for old equipment. Blame them. The good/bad thing about WIndows is it has incredible support from third party vendors, but users and MS are ultimately reliant upon them to get the job done.

Has my battery life suffered because of VIsta? Too early to tell as I usually have my SZ90 plugged in. But my camera and all functions work properly. It wasn't hard.

The only problem I've had so far is with SpySweeper which blue screened my install. That's it.

 

Wow, I love Vista on my SZ-450. Everything works perfectly out of the box. Perfectly stable and surprise, surprise...Aero runs beautifully on the Intel graphics chip. Only use the 7400 for gaming. I love it. Not leaps and bounds better than XP by any stretch, but pretty darn cool and a definite step up.

cgardnerma