LIVEdigitally

So I kinda, well, chickened out today. I did my entire backup – twice actually, once on my office Drobo, the other on my home Maxtor NAS. As an aside, I’d like to give a special big heartfelt “thank you” to the folks at Norton Security Center who found a way to protect me by preventing me from finding my NAS on my home network for an hour or so. The helpfulness and security I now bask in is wonderful. Yes, the sarcasm is at an all-time high right now.

Anyhow, I’m still in my awkward Vista stage, and was trying to get a video I captured yesterday for a friend of mine online. Windows Media Player is crashing on me, so I tried using one of the built-in Sony applications to preview the video clip I made. Here’s the error I saw:

Ok, fess up. I’m on candid camera, right? Right?

Sometime last week I had come to the conclusion that either my new Vaio VGN-SZ460N is a lemon, or Vista is utterly terrible, or somewhere in between. On Monday night while talking to Michael Gartenberg (who’s spent more time with Vista and Vaios and everything else known to man and computing), he concurred that while Sony isn’t exactly known for high quality drivers, my experiences were, in a word, subpar.

By the way – iPhone.

After hearing enough Apple Geniuses stories (with the exception apparently of when you just walk into the store and try to buy a computer, at which point they no longer retain ‘genius’ status in my eyes, but I digress), yesterday I decided I’d put Sony to the task. Called support, held, held, held, held more, held, talked to someone, escalated, held, held, escalated, held, got on the phone with a specialist. Ahh. Specialist.

This guy (coincidentally named Jeremy – sweet) really did have a good grasp on the situation. Didn’t try to duck and cover. Didn’t have me waste time with a defrag or other clearly unnecessary step. His hunch was one of the following issues:

1. Bad motherboard
2. Bad RAM
3. Bad Vista load

After some diagnostics last night, it’s apparently not the RAM. And while it could be the motherboard, I don’t really want to wait the 7-10 days, nor pay $150 for on-site support. Supposedly some SonyStyle stores will get their own geniuses too sooner or later, but I’m not one for patience. So reloading Vista is the path I’ll try – I actually did have a quirky bootup the first time I turned on the PC, which apparently can knock the self-install for a loop, so hopefully that’s all the fix I need.
So, I’m doing my backup to my Drobo right now, and will follow up with a full System Recovery later this morning.

ps – The reason I wrote ‘iPhone’ above is apparently Congress recently passed a law that stated all blog posts made in the month of June must in some way reference the iPhone. Didn’t want to get in trouble…