I have had my Vaio FE41M with Vista Home Premium pre-installed for almost two months now, and I've had quite a few problems, especially related to the graphics card. Inside is a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 GPU and I am not sure if it is even compatible with Vista or if I have the correct drivers or not.
Some of the problems I have are:
- When I use an external monitor the screen looks too sharpened (like you can sharpen photos) with fringing around text, making it hard to read
- In Photoshop when I move a window around it is sometimes copied and stays on the screen after you've moved it somewhere else
- When I close the laptop lid (using the external monitor) my graphics driver crashes, my screen turns to a lower resolution and several minutes later the computer will reboot spontaneously (Sony came with a BIOS update to fix the lid problem on this model. I installed it but now it is worse)
- The function button option to switch between laptop screen and external monitor works very poorly. When I boot up without an external monitor plugged in and then plug in the cable there is no way to use the monitor until I reboot. This worked fine on my old laptop in XP.
- Several software programs, like Second Life, don't work and tell me I don't have the latest graphics driver installed
I don't like the shiny screen of the laptop much either. The sales person in the store convinced me to get this thing because the screen was so state-of-the-art, but the more I use it the more it annoys me. There is too much glare and you have to sit right in front of it to see everything clearly.
I have contacted the helpdesk but their answers (which usually take at least a week) are very cryptic and don't make any sense. When I asked if they were going to release new graphics drivers for this computer anytime soon I got an answer back that I should recover the system and reinstall Vista. What the heck? Later someone wrote "Vista drivers will be release on on our website as Vista o/s has come on stream."
Why does Sony sell a laptop with Vista pre-installed with a graphics card inside that they don't have drivers for? I paid € 1400 for this thing!!
This is my first Sony computer and I am very very disappointed. I find the helpdesk is very slow and doesn't give clear answers, the VAIO update website and service is very unprofessional and unclear, most of the VAIO software on my new computer give errors, and is it just me or does the keyword search on this forum not work at all?!
:o(
