Sony Vaio VPCF23P1E - upgrade to Win 7 Ultimate N

[Shocked_Pants]

Just purchased one of these to use as a business laptop, however it has come installed with Win 7 Home Premium, and I need Ultimate N for the security features. I have a Technet account so have performed a legal clean install on Win 7 U N, gone to put all the drivers and software back, and I'm not really impressed at all!!

For a company of Sony's size, I would expect them to be selling a high end laptop with a high end OS on it, and also providing software support in 64bit for that OS. I've found that Vaio Care keeps telling me it needs to update and won't work without doing so, but it keeps updating to the same version. The utility buttons above the keyboard don't seem to have any reinstallable driver or software to get them working again, and all the preinstalled goodies are not preinstallable either. Seems like a globally very badly thought through process when preparing this laptop for shipping and selling.

I even had the "this isn't a Sony battery" message on the screen until I installed .net4!!

This has been my first experience of buying a Sony laptop, and given the performance so far, is likely to be my last. Don't get me wrong, love the laptop, the hardware etc and Win 7 U N works without a problem, but there's no support for upgrading a business level laptop up to business level functionality without losing any of the Sony-specific extras that came with the laptop as shipped.

Bah, should have paid that extra hundred quid and got the Dell XPS17......

Message was edited by: Shocked_Pants

Message was edited by: Shocked_Pants

[Blencogo]

Sony market the F-Series as a "Multimedia" model, so it comes with W7 Home Premium 64-bit preinstalled.

Sony have never made it easy to clean install a new OS as Vaios still use a lot of proprietary software to get full functionality.  Also some of the preinstalled software is limited by licensing agreements to be installable ONLY as part of the Sony OEM OS and cannot be downloaded for use on another OS.  Sony will not support the new OS either.

The only way you could keep all this software (and save the need to reinstall the proprietary utilities) would be to carry out a Windows Anytime Upgrade to W7 Ultimate - however I don't think the cut-down "N" version can be installed this way.

Have you reinstalled all the Preinstalled Drivers and Utilities?  These will control any special buttons etc.

Unfortunately the Support website does not seem to be working at the moment, so I can't give you a direct link to the download website - I will add this here later if I can.