I wrote the other day about the Sony VAIO laptop with Vista Home Premium loaded, but no support for Windows XP.
As it turns out, I actually formatted the hard drive and installed XP before I discovered that Sony had no drivers. Sounds stupid, maybe, but it just never occurred to me that a company like Sony wouldn’t have XP drivers for a new laptop. By the way, this means you would NOT see this laptop used to any extent in Corporate America – one big clue to whether you want to own it or not.
It also turns out that Sony provides no recovery CD; just a recovery partition that I had also removed. From forum posts on the web, I found that one isn’t even available from Sony! (Is this a company you want to buy hardware from?)
Other forum posters who had done what I did now have an expensive doorstop. Pretty useless.
Me? Just so happens that before I did anything to the laptop I took an image of the entire drive, recovery partition and all, with Acronis True Image.
So, I plugged in the USB drive, inserted the Acronis boot CD, rebooted and restored. Good as new… as good as that is.
For more details on Acronis True Image, look here.
