VGN-A517M Windows 7 Install/Upgrade

[steve.baxter]

Anyone had any experience or can offer any advice on upgrading from WinXP on an old VAIO VGN-A517M?

Due to speed issues & general sluggishness, have backed up & restored to factory settings, which gives me a fresh copy of WinXP, then upgraded to Vista & finally Windows 7 but computer is still unuseably slow. Have also forgone all of the original WinXP bloatware & gone for clean install of Windows 7 but then struggle to find all drivers. Windows 7 is listed as supported on the Sony support site but not much software/drivers are actually included. Using these & then some others found for similar models (not ideal) results in similarly slow & error ridden OS.

Having also extensively searched for others with similar issues & come across virtually nothing, should I take it that no one else has successfullycompleted this either?

TIA

[Blencogo]

Hi Steve.

I presume you have upgraded the RAM to 2048MB from the originally supplied 1024MB. It would be touch and go to run Vista or Windows 7 with 2GB of memory and almost impossible with only 1GB - it would be very slow as it would be forever writing data to the hard disc pagefile because of the shortage of memory.  I would also not expect the 1.86GHz Mobile M 750 processor to set the world on fire either!

However, it should be just possible to run Vista or Windows 7 on your Vaio.

Looking at the Support website, Windows 7 is not supported for a clean install as there is no full driver set available for download - in fact there are none of the important drivers. 

From memory, I am fairly sure the recommended method of installing Windows 7 was to install Vista along with ALL the Vista drivers (which are fully provided) and then run an "Upgrade in Place" to Windows 7 (NOT a clean install)  which will retain all the Vista drivers - most of which should work OK with Windows 7, but you may need to seek out some individual drivers.

I would give the upgrade via Vista a go but I would be surprised if it is ever going to run as fast as it would with XP.

[steve.baxter]

Thanks for taking the time to reply & the valid points contained therein. I had considered the memory but didn't expect it to be as slow as it was - your points have just driven that home, so thanks again. The machine originally came to me because it was running excrutiatingly slow & even a restore to factory settings did not seem to resolve it once all updates had been reapplied. I eventually resorted to low level reformating the hard disk & selectively installing SP3 & updates but couldn't see the point in returning to owner with obsolete OS & decided to update for them!! Sticking with XP for now & they can decide if they wish to invest in new memory before I get any more such great ideas! Frankly, be glad to just be shot of the damn thing now!