Given up on FE-41S - life shouldn't be this hard

[t1ber1us]

Dear all,

I bought an FE-41S a couple of weeks ago - the biggest IT mistake of my life. I'm not a PC newby - I have been using machines since the days of DOS, and have used every version of Windows since 3.1. I'm the one people come to in order to get their machines to work! However, this has been an unmitigated disaster. The machine came so full of bloatware that Windows just about ground to a halt, continually crashing. I'd have looked up what the manuals recommended I do, but My Club Vaio wouldn't work either (see my earlier post - none of the fixes posted here worked) and so I couldn't. I've reinstalled Vista twice to try and solve the problems, but to no avail. On one occasion I was left having to contact Microsoft because, after a system restore, Vista declared my copy to be illegal, and a very unpleasant lady attempted to try and get me to pay for another license. I've now tried to strip the machine down to the basic level of OS installation to make it work, but to no avail - it still crawls along and has a number of problems. My display resets itself to an unpleasant resolution every time it comes out of suspend (when it doesn't blue screen) even though I have the latest Sony drivers installed (from the Sony website), and they are meant to address this specific issue. I'm running home premium without Aero, but can still outtype the machine at Word (and I'm not that fast). Vista sometimes take an age to close down or restart, and I have no idea what it's up to. Trying to move files around sometimes takes so long I think that the OS has given up.

I've given up on this two week old machine. I'm going to put it away somewhere and hope that, at some point, Sony can be bothered to release a range of vista patches that make its own hardware work correctly, and Microsoft, through vista service pack one, make their new OS function at a basically acceptable level. Looking at PC magazines over the last couple of months I seem not to be alone, with journalists who I've read for years suggesting that they are downgrading back to XP because of the instability of Vista. On the evidence of this machine, both Sony and Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves. I've wasted £750 and am off to an Apple centre to buy a macbook.

Depressed, and out of pocket.

Ian

[bertnut]

Hi there

I can sympathise with the problems you are having as I have the exact same machine and have had all the issues you have experienced.

I have reinstalled vista on it's own with out all the rubbish and after a few updates all is well. If you do need any of the preinstalled software there are posts on here which tell you how to extract the stuff you need.

I agree with you, out of the box it takes an absolute age to start up and is so full of rubbish programs running in the back ground it virtually brings the machine to a stand still! I was so disapointted when I got it I made it dual boot to XP but I have to say (touch wood) all has been well with Vista for a while now.

If there is one consolation I paid another £250 for my machine a couple of months ago! How gutted am I!

Good luck!

[Charlie1978]

I bought a FE41E 4 or 5 months ago. I am gutted at the performance of Vista and wondered if anyone could help me? I am having numerous problems, the 2 main frustrations being with Flash player and the ac3 filter. I can't view basic web content on many sites and divx and windows media player inform me the correct codecs are not installed when I know they are. This results in pictures but no sound.

Even basic functions like viewing a slideshow of pictures from a window or, occasionally daring to try to load WMP result in system crashes.

I bought this laptop from PC World Business who claim it is a software issue. The people in PC World however, say the hardware is faulty and the responsibility of Sony.

Any advice would be very helpful as I don't feel I should have to buy a Mac because of these problems?