Sony and its insanely ambitious embracement of Vista in Vaio P


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David Kwok

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If you are a newly Sony Vaio P user and frustrated over the $ you spend on such a fine piece of hardware but have to live with the mediocre performance offered by M$ Vista. I'm glad to inform you that I'm now a much much happier customer using Windows XP on Sony Vaio P.

You can also be one by following the instruction found in http://forum.pocketables.net/showthread.php?p=15670

Allow me to let you know that the performance gain you get from a OS downgrade is what we called a Day and Night difference. Going thru the hassle of doing a downgrade is definitely the wisest choice to be made than to stay with the warranty offerred Vista solution.

It's unknown officially why Sony decided to embrace a memory and CPU hogging OS such as Vista on a low-end CPU like Atom, but unless there is some undertable agreement with M$, or if customers get free or discounted upgrade later when Windows 7 is out, we know Sony has made a fool out of the customers purchasing this product with Vista installed and no official solution to downgrade to XP.

Allow me to list out what you gain and lose when you did an upgrade

GAIN:
1) A much more responsive system, gone are those graphical updates that never keep up with your mouse clicks, refresh of graphics or webpages that are so slow that you thought your eyes are playing tricks on you.
2) More memory and cpu processing power to run more applications multi-tasking at the same moment.
3) More productive on your leisure activities such as surfing clubsnap on the browser, chatting with your friends, listening to music, watching a video. If not these cases, probably you are seeking a balance between swallowing that frustration of waiting and lags happening, and smashing the small little cute expensive toy you just indulge in.
4) Sony put a Energy Saving sticker on the machine. That is a joke, with CPU hogging OS eating away precious battery, means you need to spend longer time to complete your activity, where is the energy saving ?
5) Watch your youtube full screen with very little frame drops, hardware based video rendering on MP4/DIVX video with hardly noticeable frame drops.
6) Move your cursor without hipcups along the screen and dragging and resizing of the windows without stuns.
7) Booting up your system in less than 30s instead of more than 1min
8) Having whopping 45+MB of free space versus 25+ of space left after the factory installation of Vista from Sony with tons of TRIALS APPLICATION.
9) No more slow and cumbersome UNINSTALLATION, versus INSTALLATION of your intended applications.
10) STAY HAPPY AND SATISFIED.

Cons
1) Less of those eye candy GUI that you fancy in Vista
2) Less assurance from Sony that your system is probably out of warranty
3) Using a more obsolete operating system that M$ is trying hard to discard in the market or not going to support in the near future.
4) Not in sync with your laptop which is probably using M$ Vista
5) There could be more, but I'm not interested to know. Probably you are :)
 

I'm waiting for Win 7 to come out. Hopefully this Sony netbook will have Win7 which I heard is very fast and low on resources. :lovegrin:
 

I'm waiting for Win 7 to come out. Hopefully this Sony netbook will have Win7 which I heard is very fast and low on resources. :lovegrin:

Well that's going to be a long wait for sure. How long no one knows :) It's only on beta now. Next is it has a similar processor hogging UI like Vista, so I doubt it will be that fast, but no doubt it is already better than Vista for sure :)

Seriously for such a small screen asset that Vaio P offers, eye candy is basically just waste of time in my opinion.

In any case, lets wait and see while I enjoy the swiftness of the XP OS for a few months first :)
 

It's unknown officially why Sony decided to embrace a memory and CPU hogging OS such as Vista on a low-end CPU like Atom, but unless there is some undertable agreement with M$, or if customers get free or discounted upgrade later when Windows 7 is out, we know Sony has made a fool out of the customers purchasing this product with Vista installed and no official solution to downgrade to XP.

It's not unknown. There is a specific agreement that Sony has with MS that all new PCs MUST ship with Vista.

However, if you buy the sony P in SG, you can get the XP "downgrade" CD for free.
 

I'm waiting for Win 7 to come out. Hopefully this Sony netbook will have Win7 which I heard is very fast and low on resources. :lovegrin:

Windows 7 beta was already tested on the Sony Vaio P in one of the reviews and it is indeed much faster, though XP is still even faster.

Note: windows 7 gave the Vaio P a lower experience score than Vista, but in actual use was faster.
 

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It's not unknown. There is a specific agreement that Sony has with MS that all new PCs MUST ship with Vista.

However, if you buy the sony P in SG, you can get the XP "downgrade" CD for free.

Okay so it's not "Unknown" :)
I called up Sony Cust Svc, they told me Sony Vaio P has no downgrade option. So yah... don't think it's official at all for Win XP installation.
 

Okay so it's not "Unknown" :)
I called up Sony Cust Svc, they told me Sony Vaio P has no downgrade option. So yah... don't think it's official at all for Win XP installation.

*shrug* I got a different story when I went to Sonystyle directly.
 

*shrug* I got a different story when I went to Sonystyle directly.

That's fine :) In any case, I don't need those silly Anti Virus and Trial applications hogging my system resources too.

I used a nLite custom made XP with less stuffs such as Games, SCSI Raid etc removed & with SP3 slipstreamed in. So the whole experience is much better also :)
 

Windows 7 beta was already tested on the Sony Vaio P in one of the reviews and it is indeed much faster, though XP is still even faster.

Note: windows 7 gave the Vaio P a lower experience score than Vista, but in actual use was faster.

why Win7 has a lower experience score than Vista? I thought Win7 GUI and Vista is largely similar except Win7 has improvements
 

why Win7 has a lower experience score than Vista? I thought Win7 GUI and Vista is largely similar except Win7 has improvements

Could be a graphic driver issue.
 

Oh,
better tell Haz...

Me, I like XP.
Who needs the transclucent windows rubbish that overloads my ram.

Changing from Vista to XP is not a downgrade.
It is an upgrade.
 

For an even smoother response, try Linux.

Linux has a graphical interface which looks and feels like Vista. On Linux, even your old PCs with less than 1 gig of RAM can have the look and feel of Vista with the smooth and stable performance of XP.
 

For an even smoother response, try Linux.

Linux has a graphical interface which looks and feels like Vista. On Linux, even your old PCs with less than 1 gig of RAM can have the look and feel of Vista with the smooth and stable performance of XP.

Not always true :) GMA500 which is the chipset used on Sony Vaio P does not have good driver in Linux. End up with worse experience. By experience with numerous Linux distributions tells me that interfaces offered by Linux doesn't necessary gives you smooth response.

To be objective, Windows give a better response in terms of response. Linux normally comes next depending on the Windowing Manager used. If you are on KDE or GNOME which is particular heavy WM, it can get pretty sluggish on video cards that are not well supported. Yet light WM such as blackbox, IceWM is pretty speedy but the features you get in them falls under minimalist.

Mac has a eye candy interface, but personally I feels kinda sluggish sometimes. Could be just a perception when it comes to the fade in and out.

I'm not a supporter for M$, just stating based on years of observation :)

Thanks
 

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