Hey gang, I posted this on another forum, I thought ye might be interested.
My experience of installing Vista Business on my SZ3VP/X using the EU drivers / utilities provided here: http://www.vaio-link.com/downloads/os/vista/upgrade.html
What I did first was uninstall all Vaio utilities and drivers from my XP Pro installation (getting rid of audio / video drivers etc, GPU switching utilities, FN key utilities, basically anything with Vaio in the title). Installed the upgrade of Vista Business.
When installation completed, I installed all the drivers from the EU drivers page first. ie Alps Bluetooth, Pointing GP, Sigmatel, synmsico, etc. All of these I ran as administrator, just in case. Also ran the BIOS upgrade. When I installed Vista I was in Stamina GPU mode, so the Intel integrated graphics was instaled fine. As the NVIDIA card wasn't thus active, I did not yet install the NVIDIA drivers.
After all the drivers were installed (which seemed to mostly install correctly; no real way of knowing), I installed all the utilities. I installed Sony Utils Utility (ASNU in the filename) first, then Sony Shared Library (ASSL), then installed everything else. Lots of these didn't install properly. More about that in a while.
Last thing I did, I used the hardware switch to select the Speed GPU setting, restarted the computer, then installed the NVIDIA drivers.
So, after all those shenanigans, the following seem to work:
-Camera / Microphone is working as usual, although Cam utility didn't install (who needs it?)
-Speed / Stamina switch works fine, and both GPUs seem to be fine.
-Power management seems to work fine, but with fewer options than in XP (can only choose Adaptive or Level 1 to 5 in CPU fan control, can disable iLink, Audio etc, or can swap between 32bit or 16bit colour depth. No other options available)
-Memory Stick Slot is AOK (icon and all in Computer).
-Bluetooth is grand.
-Function keys for Brightness, Volume, Mute and Hibernate are all fine, although there seems to be a slight delay in the "beep" sound, which is a little distracting.
-Fingerprint scanner is working fine; in fact, works much much better than the older version (scans finger first time nearly every time). Also, now supports Firefox 2.0 and multiple tabs in IE7. Doesn't seem to support finger-swipe Windows Login yet though.
-Vaio Control Centre installed fine, so from here could select what the S1 and S2 buttons do, what the lid opening does, etc. Good stuff. There still seem to be one or two features missing from the XP version though. For example, no option to slow CPU fan speed with one of the S buttons.
-HDD protection says that its working fine, from the Control Centre, but I'm not in the mood to shake my Vaio to see if its lying or not 😉
-Hibernate and Sleep work fine, but when in sleep mode the WLAN light is still on. Is this a Vista thing or a Vaio issue?
-DVD/CD burning is OK.
Stuff that doesn't work:
-Wireless switch utility is AWOL; hardware switch works fine but there's no option to have WLAN on with Bluetooth off. Not mission critical though as all other wireless networking features work ok.
-Seemingly no support for Vaio Update.
-Infineon TPM (Trusted Platform Module) installed ok, and the hardware was detected, but it could not Authorise. Not sure why. This prevented the fingerprint scanner software from working too. Not exactly what good this TPM stuff is to me anyway, so I uninstalled it, and the finerprint software began working straight away after.
Notes:
-Windows Experience Index is 3.2 at the moment, seemingly crippled by the NVIDIA graphic performance. Thought it would have scored higher, but what the hell.
-It might be just my imagination, but I think the Power Management runs my SZ a good bit cooler than the XP version did. I have no way of checking the temperature though because Mobile Meter doesn't work on Vista.
Hope this was of help. Hope to hear from other SZ users as to how their installation went. You pretty much need a free afternoon to get all this done. As it stands, I'm probably going to go back to my XP installation for the time being (cheers, Acronis TrueImage), but I'm sure Sony will have ironed out all the above issues by March. In general, quite happy with Vista, it seems to work quite well.
Dave
