When Ed Bott first told me he wanted to get a look (so to speak) under the Sony Vaio’s hood, I have to admit, I sorta snickered. Not because I didn’t think it would be interesting, but because I was pretty sure the situation was so hopeless. He’s had a few days with it now and it turns out he’s making some impressive progress. So impressive that I might not be able to write snarky headlines like this one anymore! Highlights:
- Before shipping the machine off to me, Jeremy noted that he had wiped out Vista and installed Windows XP. Ironically, the machine with XP installed was practically unusable. (jt: yes, this I can attest to!)
- With a clean install of Vista Business and enough custom drivers to enable all installed hardware devices, the system was a rocket. Boot time to the logon screen was 33 seconds. (jt: zomg!)
- With that hardware and a clean copy of Vista, there’s no slowdown to be noted. (jt: wow!)
Ed will go into the nitty gritty of how he waded through the Sony murk and mire to accomplish this in a future post, but I do recommend reading his report so far. Especially the part where he’ll be talking to Sony reps, I’m very curious about their feedback.
Since I’ve never really talked about it, I wanted to clear up one potential misconception of “me vs Sony”. As I blogged about back in 2006, I loved my last Vaio. I told *the world* about my Vaio (literally, as that was the year I notched about 180K miles). I raved and raved. When someone wanted a reco, I said “buy-0 a Vaio” (not really, I’m not quite that corny). So when mine got stolen and I replaced it with the newer model it was as a previously very satisfied customer.
When you go from really loving something to finding its replacement utterly terrible (much like Crissy on Three’s Company), there’s a true feeling of betrayal. I am like a woman scorned, and plan to tell everyone in the world as such until I feel it’s been made right. Ed has very generously offered his time to do this “Vaio Speedup Challenge”, but frankly I feel that Sony “owes” me. Is that a fair feeling, probably not. I feel much of the same angst toward Microsoft right now, as a 15-year Windows veteran I am not happy with the fact that I felt I had no choice but to go Mac. It’s all a little irrational, but spending 8-16 hours a day with a computer over my career pretty much implies I’ve spent more waking hours with Windows than I have with my wife so far! That’s quite a relationship to burn.
Back to the topic at hand. I am very excited to see the new & improved Vaio. The Dell I’ve been checking out has performed very well (we had a minor snafu with a mouse we hooked up, but it turns out it was a negligible error that was fixable in minutes), and it’s refreshing to see a Vista experience that is leaps and bounds above what I’ve experienced so far. And huge thanks to Ed for taking the time to do this!!!