About 6 weeks ago, I purchased a new laptop for Gail. Her Dell had been in the path of Hurricane Sarah, and the display on the laptop was half-broken (the top half worked great. Bottom half, not so much). It was an honest accident that happened at least 6 months ago, and Sarah still feels bad about breaking mommy’s laptop.

One evening, after having to use Gail’s clunky jerry-rigged setup (17in monitor hooked up to the laptop, sitting on its own side table while the laptop sat on the dining room table), I went to Best Buy, and pretty much on the spur of the moment, bought a Sony Vaio laptop. The hardware specs on this thing are nice: Dual Core 1.66 ghz, 2GB of RAM, 180 GB hard drive. It’s a good machine and should last Gail awhile. But it has one serious flaw:

Vista.

Windows Vista can be summed up in one word: Beta. And in this case, beta is synonymous with crap. This feels like the most incomplete OS I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing with. It has weird quirks that just makes it feel like it’s not done. When I purchased the laptop, I got a free Lexmark printer/scanner with it. Gail’s been wanting a scanner, so I was kind of jazzed about that. I set it up, put in the included CD with the drivers, and spent the next week trying to get it to work consistently. I would get it to work OK, but if I turned the printer off or unplugged it, the next time I powered it on (or plugged it in), Vista would try to re-install the drivers and set up a new default printer. At one point in the Printer Control Panel, I had 8 freakin’ Lexmark printers listed.

It’s also been having a wonderful time trying to find my wireless network. With XP, I’d open the laptop and in 2 seconds or less, it would detect my wireless and I’d be happily surfing away. With Vista, I’ve had it take 10 minutes, 2 reboots, and lots of creative cursing. And I’m not the only one…my boss at the restaurant has the same damn problem. I’m hoping there will be an update fix for it soon.

Vista Error

And then there’s error messages like the one up above. I’m thinking some poor programmer from India, with a minimal grasp of the English language, was tasked with creating this message, and then no one bothered to proof read it. I’ve read it three times, and it still doesn’t make sense to me.

So, after 5 weeks of crap like this, I did what felt natural; wiped it and installed XP. Well, apparently 90% of the stuff that’s in the Sony Vaio I have doesn’t even have drivers for XP, it’s all Vista. I spent another two days trying to get video working properly (it always looked too flattened for the wide screen), trying to get wireless working, etc. I finally hopped into the Sony Support chat room to ask about the availability of drivers for XP and was scolded for removing Vista. I kid you not.

So, after realizing that XP wouldn’t be that much better, I ordered a System Restore disk ($38 bucks with expedited shipping. Tax time ya know…), and now I’m back to square 2. Not square 1, because I have the printer working exactly as it should. Rather than trying to install from the supplied CD, I just downloaded the driver straight from Lexmark’s website and it works as expected now.

In all this, the thing that REALLY kills me is my impulsiveness…if I’d taken just an hour to think it over, rather than fly off the handle and decide Gail needed a new laptop RIGHT FRAKIN’ NOW, I would’ve thought about getting her a new MacBook, which will install and dual-boot XP just fine for when she wants/needs to use Windows.

Anyone want to purchase a new Sony Laptop? :)