The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

I have now spent ten days with my new computer with the Windows Vista Business edition operating system and have formed a few opinions:

 

The Good

The Sony Vaio VGN-AR370 is a beautifully designed 17" notebook computer. Its keyboard has very large keys and is well laid out. It is much better than the HP dv9000T that operated for two hours before dying. Sony configured the computer exactly as I had specified. So far I have found no hardware flaws. Vista has not crashed or hung. I have had no problems with Microsoft Office 2007 applications. I can use my external disk drive with the firewire port. I can sync the basic calendar, address book, memo functions of my Palm TX. I am able to transfer photos from my camera's memory card with the card reader. I like the special buttons next to the keyboard to eject a disk from the drive. There are also buttons to adjust the speaker volume.

 

The Bad

In order to close security holes in Windows, Microsoft has not provided backward compatibility with much existing software and hardware. I have not had any problems with Vista because I have been extremely cautious before installing or even running older applications. Sony was not so cautious. They have installed a number of programs on this computer that were designed for XP. I am sure they did this because I bought the computer before the new versions have been released. I had Sony install Photoshop Elements on the computer. The first time I loaded the program it said it was incompatible with Vista but was directed to the Adobe website. They  had a patch available that changed the Version to 5.02 which does run on Vista.. At the present time I am without a way to print or scan documents. I am waiting on Canon to start shipping their new MF4690 all in one laser. The driver for my little Epson PictureMate photo printer is included with Vista according to the Epson support site. I have not found the courage to test it.

 

The Ugly

It has been almost five years since I purchased a new computer. In that time the cost-cutting computer companies have outsourced their tech. support operations overseas. Many of the people who are answering support calls just are not fluent in conversational English. A mal-functioning computer in itself is very stressful, but then mix in a phone call after more than an hour on hold with a person who does not respond to what you are saying and the situation rapidly becomes unbearable. My one call to Sony was answered in Florida. I had a very simple issue, and it was resolved. I give Sony credit in that they are directing the phone calls to specialists depending on the issue. HP on the other hand just dumps the calls into one big pool. Where Sony fell down was on their email support. I am certain that my email was answered in a overseas location by a person with a poor command of English.

 

The second issue that I consider very ugly is the trouble people are getting into by loading Apple's iTune on their pc's running Vista. Yesterday I found a thread where people with new computers with SATA disk drives with RAID technology enabled were getting errors that made it appear that they had failed drives. There was one who had to send a new notebook back to Dell and another to HP. My computer has the SATA drives with the Intel Matrix controller. After reading that I decided there is no way that I will install iTunes until I am certain the issues have been resolved. I miss my podcasts.