Vista as an instrument of meditation…
by Rafael Ferreira
I’m typing this as I wait for my dad’s brand new Sony VAIO to run Vista’s “checking your hardware” utility; it has been doing this for about 8 minutes now. Before this lovely state, I had to wait while it ran “windows gets ready to run for the first time” for about 20 minutes.
wait.. it just rebooted, looks like it is done.
So in total, it took me 5 minutes to unpackage the VAIO plug it in and turn it on, and about 28 minutes to run Vista for the first time.
Two things I don’t understand:
1) This is a brand new US$2,000 laptop with a fancy hybrid hard drive, why does it need to “check my hardware”?
2) Why OEM’s put up with this? I mean Sony should have enough leverage to force Microsoft to provide them with a “quick firstboot” version of Vista.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Windows hater, I’m fine with it for the most part, but this just pushes my patience to a whole new level… has no one at Microsoft used a Mac and seen their elegant “firstboot” system? Or used pretty much any recent Linux distro for that matter?
btw.. windows is still booting…
I’ve installed Vista from scratch many times and never has it taken more than a few minutes to complete the first boot. I’m finding more and more that OEMs are a big reason for Vista’s bad press. Just recently I got an HP laptop with Vista preinstalled. It ran ok for the most part, but was sluggish sometimes and had occasional weird glitches. I decided to wipe out HP’s preinstalled crap and did a clean, fresh, install from a clean Vista DVD. It worked wonders and it now runs faster and more stable than before. All the crapware that HP loaded is what was causing problems – not Vista. I would not be suprised if it was the same way with Sony in your case.
It’s very likely that this “check my hardware” was just the installation of Vista from a hidden partition on your drive. Other than that: Do whar Jonathan said. Won’t take longer to install it clean from disk than that
Is that a baseline vista or one of the highly customized Sony one?
Sony is very well known to install an unimaginable level of crapware on their machines, to the point where they’re rendered useless.
First thing I do with a sony machine is reinstall a clean copy of the OS without all their “improvements” baked in…
Yeah, after some severe deletion of crapware things are looking better but still, my whole point is about the flawed experience
I was roped into helping set up a friends new laptop. I had the exact same experience, the first time i turned it on i had to wait about 30 mins for the whole thing to set itself up before i could do anything. Very irritating, especially since this could have been done by the OEM (mostly).
…or Sony could use an HD-image of a Vaio that had been powered on once.
/johan/