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/