So, I’d purchased this Sony VAIO laptop, a VAIO CR220E/L which came pre-installed with Vista Home Premium and a bunch of other software from Sony, and it ran okay for a while… but not well-enough to satisfy me. It took too long to boot up, and a lot of the extra software was pure bloat (Windows Media Center, a bunch of AOL crap, extra Sony interface that just duplicated the functions of Windows, Norton 360 trial edition which I don’t need since I have access to DoD protection software, and so on). I spent a long time trying to uninstall a lot of that crap, and then… system failure.
I found myself in possession of a system that wouldn’t boot at all, not even in Safe Mode. It’d load, but the login screen would never appear. I ran the recovery options on Norton Ghost, backed up all my personal files, and tried to run the recovery utility from the little drive-partition that Sony had put all the OEM software on, and… it wouldn’t run. Luckily, the recovery utility was still uncorrupted on the C: drive, so I restored the drive to original delivery state, and started resetting it to the state I wanted it in.
This time, when I attempted to run Disk Cleanup, it mistook all my personal files, all the Sony recovery files, and part of the Boot Sector as files to be deleted, and I was again the owner of a computer that wouldn’t boot, only now it was unrecoverable as well. Luckily, I still had the backups of my personal files from the first crash.
Sick of dealing with the Sony software package, I did a complete reformat and clean reinstall, setting up a dual-boot system of Windows XP Home Edition and Windows Vista Business, both purchased at the PX. This way, if one of the OS-s crash, I can use the working one to recover. They installed fairly well… Note to anyone who contemplates doing this: install XP first, and Vista second. You can end up with ugly conflicts in your Boot Manager doing it the other way around.
This leads me to my current gripe - finding Windows XP drivers for the hardware in my VAIO CR220E/L… Sony is not providing any kind of support for XP anymore (they cite ‘legal reasons’… meaning, they’re under pressure from Microsoft to only support Vista, and they’re too cheap to continue to support XP). I thought I’d purchased a computer from Sony, not a Vista Operating Station.
So, I’m still hunting for drivers on the net; I’ve located the drivers for the basic chipset, the video array, and the modem, but still haven’t located drivers for the PCI Bridge, the sound array, and the Sony memory-card reader… and Sony doesn’t list component specs for any of their computers anywhere that I’ve found thus far.
It’s all very frustrating.
EDIT: In looking at my website stats, I’m getting a lot of search-hits for the same issues from other people… here’s what I’ve been able to find. Sony-Asia has XP Downgrade Drivers for cr2-series laptops on this page, though for some reason, their American counterpart doesn’t want to refer you to them.
Check your particular make/model for its components list… some of these drivers may not be for you, but a lot of the standard ones (modem, camera, memory-chip socket, etc.) should work for you.
Vista drivers for the CR220e are on this page.