Back in March I was in airport plaza shopping mall in Chiang Mai and in a fit of compulsive buying I bought a Sony Vaio TX56SN. Actually it was a expensive mistake because I have since discovered that I cant be bothered with switching between computers when travelling and being at home, so I have since switched over to a Macbook Pro. But, I still have the Sony which I have not really used because its hopelessly & pathetically slow when running the supplied Vista Business with the 1Gb of memory.

Strangely the Vista enabled TX was 10,000 baht cheaper than the XP enabled TX, which whilst it had a different model name is identical in all respects except a 80gb HD instead of 60gb…I was buggered if I was going to pay 10,000 baht for 20gb of drive space.. no I figured I would get the Vista model and then put XP on it.

My mistakes were as follows:

• It’s next to impossible to get XP drivers for the TX56SN as it has only ever been supplied with Visa.
• 20gb may not seem like much difference, but the drive in these Sony TX machines is not anuything like a “normal” notebook drive.. it’s a special, slimmer, smaller drive that uses much less power but is very very slow.
• The supplied configuration was so slow it felt like a i486 from the 90’s…but slower.

Anyway, as I have recovery disks (so nothing to lose) I decided today to install XP.

First the basic XP install is easy, whilst the video card is not identified it still works at the correct resolution even before any drivers are installed.

I downloaded the drivers for the closest model I could find (same hardware spec) a TX3HP/w, that got the chipset drivers installed, network & video. Before I could install the sound driver I had to apply a microsoft patch as it kept saying I had to install a Microsoft Bus Manager.

Now I just have a couple of exclamation marks in my device manager, and my AV buttons, Volume buttons, HDD protection and Bluetooth still dont work as I dont have the utilities. Im working on that.

But, XP is about 600% faster than Vista on this machine , I know that sounds stupid but it really is, XP works like a real computer on the TX, the supplied Vista was so slow it was not really useable. The 7 hour battery life was wasted because it took forever to do simple things..xp is great on here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 1:58 pm and is filed under PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.