October 14th, 2009

Windows 7 in the real world: 10 PCs under the microscope

Posted by Ed Bott @ 2:37 pm

Categories: Hardware, Windows 7

Tags: Notebook, Dell Computer Corp., Media Center PC, PC, Driver, Microsoft Windows Vista, CableCard, Intel Core 2 Duo, RAM, Intel Corp.

When the slow-motion launch of Windows 7 finally ends and it hits store shelves next week, will it erase the memory of Windows Vista? Yes, it’s gotten good reviews in the run-up to its official release, but so did Windows Vista. Harry McCracken has put together a retrospective of those Vista reviews from late 2006 and early 2007 that’s well worth reading, and he closes his analysis with a warning about the need to postpone judgment until the product has been in the marketplace for a while: “There’s never been a new operating system that didn’t cause significant headaches for a meaningful (if, in the best cases, small) percentage of the people who installed it, and there’s never been one that wasn’t significantly improved by the first major round of post-release bug fixes.”

Absolutely right.

An operating system doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is inexorably tied to CPUs and chipsets, storage controllers, display adapters, external peripherals, drivers, and third-party programs. Give me the right hardware and well-written drivers and I can make any modern OS (even the despised Windows Vista) run with impressive performance and reliability. Throw in a flaky motherboard, a bad BIOS, or a buggy driver, and your computing experience will quickly spiral into unpleasantness. One hopes that the PC industry learned the painful lessons of Vista and that the wave of new PCs that will begin shipping next week will be properly tuned to the new operating system.

In the meantime, I’ve done the next best thing. Over the past three months, I’ve been test-driving the final version of Windows 7 in my home and office on a variety of PCs, performing a variety of roles. The 10 systems I cover in this article include six desktops and four notebooks. All of them were put into service in January 2007 or later. For each one, I’ve listed the current hardware configuration, the price I paid (including upgrades), the version of Windows 7 currently installed, and whether I did a clean install or an upgrade. The PCs I looked at represent a cross-section of the market as it exists today, minus two extremes: I didn’t include any low-powered netbooks, and I left out high-powered gaming machines and workstations.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 9th, 2009

The single biggest reason why Windows 7 won't be another Vista

Posted by Ed Bott @ 1:49 pm

Categories: Hardware, Windows 7

Tags: Dell Computer Corp., Microsoft Windows Vista, Hardware Maker, Hardware, Current Model, Driver Hiccup, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems

You want to know why Windows 7 isn’t going to be another Vista? Here’s one big reason: drivers. This time, hardware makers seem to be keeping pace with the operating system and the hardware.

Case in point: I’ve spent the past three months collecting detailed reports about 10 systems I’ve been using to test-drive the final version of Windows 7. One is a Dell Studio XPS 13 notebook. It’s sleek, fast, and good looking, with some little touches that I’ve really come to like: an illuminated keyboard and automatic logon via facial recognition. But it has also suffered from one nagging issue that other owners of this machine have complained about as well. After resuming from sleep, the wired network connection refuses to work and stays on strike until a restart. The touchpad also occasionally works in erratic fashion, with some pointer movements jittering across the screen.

So I was very pleasantly surprised today when I logged onto Dell’s support site, selected this model from my systems list, and saw a new Windows 7 x64 category. Even better, the available downloads include a new BIOS, date-stamped September 16, and new drivers for the Nvidia chipset, dated today. There are also new drivers (just released yesterday) for the IDT audio subsystem and for the Synaptics touchpad. The QuickSet software that enables hardware buttons has an August date stamp. (There’s no update yet for the Nvidia Nforce network adapter, so I used the Vista x64 model instead.)

How much trouble was it to get all those changes slipstreamed into the system? Read the rest of this entry »

May 3rd, 2009

How many Intel CPUs will fail the XP Mode test in Windows 7?

Posted by Ed Bott @ 11:27 am

Categories: Hardware, Windows 7, Windows XP

Tags:

Some of the most popular PCs on the market today, equipped with fast and powerful dual- and quad-core CPUs, won’t be able to use the vaunted Windows XP Mode in Windows 7.

When Windows Vista launched, Intel and Microsoft both got a black eye over the infamous “Vista Capable” logo. That sticker was slapped on PCs running some of Intel’s most popular graphics chips, even though they wouldn’t run the new Aero graphics. Microsoft is still battling in court with angry customers (and their lawyers) who felt betrayed by that marketing campaign.

Now, three years later, it appears to be time for the “Vista Capable” sequel. How much positive Windows 7 buzz will be wiped out in coming weeks and months when consumers and business buyers discover that a heavily hyped new Windows 7 feature, XP Mode, won’t work on some Intel-based products? The problem is caused by the Byzantine way Intel packages its CPU technology—adding, removing, and tweaking features like bus speed and cache size to hit the widest variety of price points for PC makers.

Read the rest of this entry »

February 6th, 2009

How well does Windows 7 handle 512MB?

Posted by Ed Bott @ 1:18 pm

Categories: Hardware, Windows 7, Windows Vista

Tags: Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows Vista, RAM, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

I’ve been spending most of my time lately conducting in-depth research into how Windows 7 works, in preparation for my next book. In the process, I’m discovering stuff that simply doesn’t become apparent to a casual tester. Case in point: Back in 2007, I looked at Windows Vista Home Basic and determined that it could run well on an older machine with limited resources, including 512MB of RAM. I never tried it with Vista Ultimate, nor would I have bothered. And since I don’t have that 2002-vintage test machine set up, I haven’t repeated those tests with Windows 7.

Earlier this week, I fired up a virtual machine running Windows XP SP3 so I could test upgrade scenarios with Windows 7. I couldn’t do a straight XP-to-Win7 upgrade, so I added a new virtual hard drive and installed Windows 7 in a dual-boot configuration. After making a few notes on how the setup process worked, I put the VM aside and went on to other work.

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 uses less memory than you might think

A few hours later, I went back to that new Windows 7 installation to look at a few details, and that’s when it struck me: This virtual machine was configured with a mere 512MB of RAM, and yet I hadn’t noticed any slowdowns during setup or in operation. Even more startling, I realized that I had inadvertently installed the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 Ultimate in this VM. But the most eye-opening moment came when I looked at Task Manager’s performance tab. I’ve pasted a screen grab of the memory gauge here.

The x64 edition of Windows 7 Ultimate running on just over 200MB of RAM? That was a pleasant surprise. I was also surprised to see that this clean install was using less than 9 GB of disk space in this VM. With my curiosity piqued, I configured a new VM using the same settings and did a clean install of Vista Ultimate, giving me a good baseline for comparing XP to its successors. Here are the stats for all three operating systems, with memory usage measured after all update operations had completed and the system had been idle for at least one hour:

Read the rest of this entry »

October 12th, 2008

Six money-saving secrets to help stretch your tech budget

Posted by Ed Bott @ 12:28 pm

Categories: Hardware, Tips

Tags: Software, Dell Computer Corp., PC, Microsoft Office, Discount, Product, Price, Tools & Techniques, Desktops, RSS

The recent collapse of worldwide financial markets has everyone on edge. If you’re like most people, the tough times have you looking around at ways to cut back on spending. And your technology budget is an especially easy target.

You might be tempted to impose a freeze on all new purchases of hardware and software, but that draconian strategy only works for so long. Sooner or later, you need to refresh old technology, either because it’s stopped working or is so slow that it’s cramping your productivity.

As part of my research into how the PC market works, I spend a lot of time looking at technology trends and market behavior. One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that most people pay way too much for hardware and software. In some cases, they pay inflated retail prices and ignore readily available discounts that can shave hundreds of dollars off the bill. Or they buy on the basis of price alone, settling for poorly made, outdated technology when they could do much better for only a few dollars more.

In today’s post, I want to share some of the secrets I’ve learned about how to shop smarter and get great PC hardware and software for a home or small office without breaking the bank.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 6th, 2008

Linux ready to replace Windows? Not yet…

Posted by Ed Bott @ 11:28 am

Categories: Hardware, Linux

Tags: Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX, Operating Systems, Open Source, Software, Ed Bott

Over at JKOnTheRun, James Kendrick uncovers a fascinating statistic originally published in Laptop Magazine:

Andy Tung, Director of US Sales for MSI … told Laptop that their experience shows that netbooks with Linux are returned four times more often than those with Windows XP.  This would indicate what others have already noted, many consumers pick up the cheaper systems and then realize that the Linux system is not what they are used to so they return it.

And this is for a product that is targeted at early adopters who are far more technically sophisticated than average; the MSI Wind is a tiny, dirt-cheap portable PC that has been selling like gangbusters to the digital elite and gadget freaks since its launch in June. I would assume that this audience would be more forgiving of rough edges and usability gotchas than more mainstream PC buyers. This comment by MSI’s Andy Tung from the original interview highlights the uphill struggle that PC makers have when dealing with Linux:

Our internal research has shown that … the main cause [of the higher return rates for Linux-based machines] is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store.

The interviewers interrupt at this point to note that they “struggled with the Linux version of the Wind U90” as well and ask whether the company plans to customize a Linux OS for the machine instead of using an off-the-shelf distro:

We plan to bring the Linux version to the U.S by the end of the year. But we are working on some of the issues with the SUSE Linux and even continue to explore other flavors of Linux. We have discussed Ubuntu with a Mac OS type of look and feel. We are talking to different suppliers to figure out the best user experience.

Finding software developers to build and support a great user experience that ties hardware and software together isn’t cheap or easy. It’s hard to imagine how that job can get done at all, much less be done well, on a PC that sells for $399 or less.

I have a couple of Linux-based systems here that I use occasionally for testing and just to stay on top of what’s happening in the wide world of computing.  I have been impressed with the way that popular Linux distros like Ubuntu have improved with each new release; these days, Linux is a great choice for technically sophisticated users who don’t mind being far, far out of the mainstream. But for people who don’t have the time or the inclination to make fundamental changes, it’s a nonstarter. If I were to switch to Linux for daily use, I would have to dramatically change my work habits and learn to use a very different set of tools than I use today. The same would be true of any of my home or small business clients.

As someone who writes about Windows for a living, I get a disproportionate amount of feedback from people who argue that open-source software is a panacea and that dumping Windows for Linux is the answer to every problem that affects the Windows ecosystem. The market is doing a pretty good job of proving that they’re wrong, as this example shows.

September 22nd, 2008

How to set up a new PC in one easy session

Posted by Ed Bott @ 5:15 pm

Categories: Hardware, Tips

Tags: Program, Folder, PC, Client, USB Flash Drive, Jason, Desktops, Hardware, Ed Bott

Fellow ZDNet blogger Jason Perlow helped a friend and colleague buy a new PC and migrate her data and settings from the old machine (Windows XP) to the new one (Windows Vista). He documents the process in The New Adventures of Christine’s Old PC.

I tip my hat to Jason for his dedication to a friend, but as someone who has been doing this for years, I shook my head at the way he turned what should be a straightforward procedure into a weekend-long geekfest, complete with the transformation of the old, slow, obsolete, spyware-ridden computer into a virtual machine on the new one. In my opinion, that’s overkill for everyone involved. (Update: Jason defends his approach in this follow-up post.)

Over the years, I’ve done this process dozens of times for business clients, family members, friends, and neighbors. I’ve got the process down to a series of checklists, all built around some core principles. First, this is a great opportunity to get rid of clutter and get a fresh start. Second, the best way to transfer data from the old machine to the new one is by physically attaching the old hard drive to the new PC. Anything else, as Jason discovered, is likely to bog down. And finally, spending time upfront figuring out what needs to be transferred and what doesn’t can save hours of time and headaches later.

Jason brought along a huge USB hard drive and a thumb drive. I agree that a USB flash drive can be useful for some small tasks, but I prefer to skip those intermediate transfers whenever possible. Trying to do large-scale data transfers with USB flash drives and cables can be problematic, especially on old, slow, problem-plagued machines, as Jason discovered. Why spend hours moving tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data from the old machine to a USB drive only to have to do it again with the new PC? Skip the two-step and do what I do: bring along a SATA/IDE-to-USB converter. Newegg sells Syba’s version of this device for around $20 including shipping. I own a couple and can recommend them without hesitation. An external power supply feeds the DC connector on the drive, and a two-headed adapter lets you connect any SATA or IDE drive directly to a USB port on the new PC. While the contents of the old computer are transferring to a folder on the new PC, you can tackle other tasks.

But before you do any of that, sit down in front of the old PC and talk to the client about what they want to accomplish with the new system. The steps in this phase are designed to make sure you don’t get stumped somewhere along the way with a detail you overlooked.

Read the rest of this entry »

September 8th, 2008

Should Microsoft get into the PC hardware business?

Posted by Ed Bott @ 7:07 am

Categories: Hardware, Microsoft

Tags: PC, Microsoft Corp., Hardware, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

I really enjoyed watching this recent interview with Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich on Microsoft’s TechNet Edge. He covers a wide range of topics, but the one that got my attention is a two-minute snippet near the end, when the interviewer asks whether Mark feels that Microsoft needs to make its own desktop hardware. (If you want to see and hear this discussion for yourself, skip ahead to the 34:03 mark in the video.)

Do you think Microsoft needs to make desktop hardware or certain desktop/server PC hardware?

There’s a lot of discussion about that – not just in the industry but also within Microsoft. Should we be developing the Windows notebook or the Windows desktop? My opinion is that what’s made Windows so successful is the fact that it’s got an ecosystem with partners that are developing software and doing different things with hardware and software. And for us to kind of block all that [pause] innovation – hate to use that word because it’s so overloaded by marketing these days – to block out that playground that people have to do cool things for customers that we can’t think of or don’t have the agility to do, I think, is not the way Windows has gotten successful. I don’t think it’s even the right thing to do now, even in response to what people see as market pressures coming from other people that are doing that. …

[O]ne of the things that you have seen Windows doing over the last couple years is reaching out and working more closely with the hardware partners, with the OEMs, to make sure that the systems they deliver to users provide a good Windows experience, and not one where it’s Windows loaded up with a bunch of junk. And also that the hardware is designed and capable of running Windows the way it should be run and not “Hey, let’s save a few dollars and put in 512 meg of RAM” instead of the couple gig that really make Windows [perform well] … because when you talk about the amount of cost for that these days it’s marginal but the difference in user experience when you look at that is pretty drastic. So, I think that’s the way that we should continue to operate is to have these deeper partnerships with companies to make sure customers do get a great experience.

The fact that these discussions are happening within Microsoft doesn’t surprise me. It’s one of the most obvious responses to Apple’s success, and it’s also in keeping with what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in his all-hands memo that was leaked to the press back in July:

In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises.

Apple makes a handful of systems using basically the same parts, and they sell the hardware, software, and support as a package. That makes it easy for them to deliver systems that work reliably and can be supported at their stores by technicians with a minimum of training. But it also means that I have limited choices if I want to buy a system running the Mac OS. I can’t buy an Apple-powered tablet, or a small and light notebook (the MacBook Air is thin and light, but it’s not small), or a powerful and expandable small-form-factor desktop. All of those choices are available to me in the PC marketplace, but they come with other tradeoffs, such as crapware and driver hassles.

I’m skeptical that a strategy of “deeper partnerships” with OEMs can really accomplish the goal of providing “complete experiences with absolutely no compromises.” Better communication can make the next generation of PCs better than the current crop, but the nature of these partnerships means that hardware makers have different goals and philosophies and levels of execution. All those engineering meetings take time and cost money, and it takes time for the results to make it into new systems. That’s why it’s tempting to suggest that Microsoft begin manufacturing its own PC hardware. Unfortunately, that would mean Microsoft would have to compete directly with its hardware partners at the retail level and maybe even in enterprise sales. Those hardware partners bring in the majority of Windows revenue by installing Windows on new hardware. I really don’t see any way that Microsoft could work through that conflict successfully or make the risk worth the reward.

But maybe there’s a way around that roadblock. For years, Microsoft has created reference designs for hardware when it introduces a new category. They’re typically done early in an OS development lifecycle, as a way for partners to see what the new technology looks like in operation. At Microsoft-sponsored hardware conferences over the years, I’ve seen reference designs for remote controls, for Media Center devices, for phones, and for home servers. What if Microsoft created reference designs for PC hardware? What if any manufacturer could license and build PCs based on those reference designs? You could have reference designs for notebooks, for desktop PCs, for home theater systems with CableCARD tuners. The reference design would specify not just the hardware, but the software as well, meaning that customers could count on crapware-free installations and easy-to-update drivers. The idea is to build a machine specifically designed for the current version of Windows and, presumably, guaranteed to show off the operating system at its very best, with no compromises. Contract manufacturers could build the systems and make them available to any OEM, large or small, so that even small-town system builders could deliver a product that would compete with the big guys.

With Microsoft one step removed from the process, the existing OEM business model would be preserved. Reviewers would have a chance to compare big-OEM designs against the Microsoft Reference Design so that measurements of OS performance could actually concentrate on the hardware and not become muddled by variables introduced by third-party hardware and software.

Finally, this would give those big OEMs a chance to put up or shut up on their “innovation.” (and yeah, I hate that word too). Is that new Sony notebook faster or slower than the Microsoft Reference Design? Do those HP diagnostic tools improve performance or drag it down? Does Dell’s wireless utility do a better job than the built-in Windows tool? With a standard hardware platform, everyone would have a baseline against which to compare, and the real innovators would stand out

So, what do you think? Would you buy a “designed by Microsoft” PC?

August 4th, 2008

You’ve got Vista x64 questions, I’ve got answers

Posted by Ed Bott @ 4:20 pm

Categories: Hardware, Windows Vista

Tags: 32-bit, Memory, Microsoft Windows Vista, VPN Client, RAM, Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), 64-Bit, Operating Systems

I got a lot of great questions and comments via e-mail and in the Talkback section of my previous post on the sudden surge in adoption rates for Windows Vista x64. In this follow-up, I summarize the answers I’ve found for each question.

How (and why) do 64-bit Windows versions use memory differently?

Rather than try to explain that here, I’m going to refer you to a very crisply written blog post by Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich, entitled “Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory.” The short version is that 32-bit operating systems can, in theory, address memory above the 4GB line on specially configured systems, but doing so is problematic:

[When] Windows XP SP2 was under development, client systems with more than 4GB were foreseeable, so the Windows team started broadly testing Windows XP on systems with more than 4GB of memory. […]

What they found was that many of the systems would crash, hang, or become unbootable because some device drivers, commonly those for video and audio devices that are found typically on clients but not servers, were not programmed to expect physical addresses larger than 4GB. As a result, the drivers truncated such addresses, resulting in memory corruptions and corruption side effects. Server systems commonly have more generic devices and with simpler and more stable drivers, and therefore hadn’t generally surfaced these problems. The problematic client driver ecosystem [led] to the decision for client SKUs to ignore physical memory that resides above 4GB, even though they can theoretically address it.

You might be surprised to learn that “[e]ven systems with as little as 2GB can be prevented from having all their memory usable under 32-bit Windows because of chipsets that aggressively reserve memory regions for devices.” My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes noted another potential problem with memory usage on 32-bit systems in this comment:

over the past few years we’ve started seeing another [big] addressible space hog - graphics cards. 265MB seems to be about the norm nowadays, but you can get monster cards with 1GB. Start messing with SLI/CrossfireX and you’re consuming a LOT of addressible space there.

Mark Russinovich confirms that observation with this real-world example:

The consumption of memory addresses below 4GB can be drastic on high-end gaming systems with large video cards. For example, I purchased one from a boutique gaming rig company that came with 4GB of RAM and two 1GB video cards. I hadn’t specified the OS version and assumed that they’d put 64-bit Vista on it, but it came with the 32-bit version and as a result only 2.2GB of the memory was accessible by Windows.

Does Vista x64 use more memory than x86?

One commenter confessed to being confused by conflicting information he’s read. Vista x64 does indeed use more memory than its 32-bit cousin, but in my tests on a dual-boot system I found the difference to be about 12-15 percent for the operating system and its essential services.

I have one test machine that’s ideally suited for this purposes, being equipped with 4GB of RAM, two hard disks, and separate installations of x86 and x64 Vista Ultimate running on separate drives. On this test platform, I found that the x64 machine consistently uses roughly 1.05GB of RAM after startup, while its x86 counterpart uses 935MB to run roughly the same number of processes. (These numbers are consistent on other systems as well.) On the x86 machine, the top 11 processes use 220MB of RAM, while the same group of processes at the top of the x64 list use 251MB.

Measuring memory use is tricky. For example, the x64 systems occasionally grabbed extra RAM from the available pool, presumably to use in building the page file and Superfetch cache. In all cases, though, memory usage eventually retreated to a baseline level and stayed there.

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to running 64-bit Windows on a system with only 1-2GB of RAM?

I haven’t specifically tested this, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend Vista x64 on a system with 1GB of RAM. With 2GB, it’s probably a wash and only worth doing if you are certain you will upgrade the system to 4GB or more. Because there’s no upgrade path from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows, this strategy avoids the need to reinstall the operating system from scratch and migrate all your programs and data files after completing the RAM upgrade.

Are there major hardware or software compatibility issues with switching to x64?

Driver coverage for mainstream devices, such as video cards, digital cameras, and network adapters, is uniformly excellent, and by design, any new system you buy with Vista x64 preinstalled will include all necessary drivers and support software for hardware such as fingerprint readers, sound, and card readers. You’re most likely to encounter problems with legacy hardware, especially scanners.

On the software side, the biggest offender is VPN software, a topic so rich it’s worth its own entry (see the next question for more details). Most 32-bit software runs fine on 64-bit Windows, although specific features sometimes change or vanish when you try to run 32-bit software on a 64-bit OS. Microsoft’s OneNote, for example, uses the Vista search index for its own internal searches but doesn’t return useful results when you search from the Start menu. The Print To OneNote feature is available only under 32-bit Windows versions, a showstopper for some OneNote fanatics. Popular consumer-focused security programs (Norton, McAfee, Windows Live OneCare) run well under Vista x64 with the noteworthy exception of ZoneAlarm (noted by this commenter), whose system requirements pointedly add “(32-bit)” after every mention of Windows Vista. It’s encouraging to see new arrivals such as Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE Antivirus + Antispyware support x64 right from the start.

Under Vista x64, some Windows utilities are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, with the 32-bit versions of Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer set as defaults to allow compatibility with plug-ins. You get no support for Flash or Silverlight, for instance, if you run a 64-bit version of IE7 or Firefox.

What’s the story with VPN clients?

Readers report problems with VPN clients from Check Point, SonicWALL/Aventail, and Cisco. Microsoft has compiled information into Knowledge Base article 929490, Windows Vista-compatible third-party virtual private network (VPN) client schedules. The article, whose Last Review date is listed as November 5, 2007) includes an awful lot of “Unknown” entries in the x64 column and notes that Cisco has no plans to update its VPN Client. The release notes for the June 2008 VPN Client 5.0 release makes it clear in two places that only 32-bit Windows versions are supported. This section documents the error message you’ll get if you try:

Installing the VPN Client on a 64-bit Vista Machine Results in a 1721 Error
Cisco IPSec Client does not support 64-bit. If the user requires 64-bit support, the upgrade path is to use the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client instead, which does support 64-bit. Note that the AnyConnect Client supports only SSL VPN connections (CSCsi26069).

Aventail’s website confirms that its Global VPN Client software works only with 32-bit Windows. Check Point Software likewise notes that its VPN-1 SecuRemote/SecureClient software is “supported on the Windows Vista 32-bit operating system,” with no mention of plans to add x64 compatibility.

Several commenters recommend using Virtual PC 2007 or another virtualization solution under Vista x64 to run a separate 32-bit OS dedicated to VPN access.

Any questions I missed? Leave them in the Talkback section below.

July 21st, 2008

Sony's amazing crapware-free PC

Posted by Ed Bott @ 6:31 am

Categories: Hardware, Windows Vista

Tags: Sony Corp., Sony Vaio, PC, Microsoft Windows Vista, Option, Fresh Start Program, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Tools & Techniques, Desktops

Sony is finally taking on its crapware problem. For the past two months, I’ve been using an astonishingly light and agile Sony VAIO notebook and loving every minute of it. The best part of all was that this machine was absolutely, completely, unequivocally crapware-free, which meant I was able to be productive within a few minutes of unboxing.

That’s a huge switch for Sony, which has taken a beating as “the poster child for negative experiences” with new PCs running Windows Vista. And it was a happy surprise for me. When I wrote about my hands-on experiences with two older VAIO notebooks earlier this year, I called it a “truly miserable experience.” It took a crapware-cleansing clean install to fix a 2007-vintage Sony notebook, and I spent hours replacing outdated drivers and removing unwanted software from a 2008 model (if you haven’t read that installment, see Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time).

In a March interview, Sony Vice President Mike Abary assured me that Sony was “listening and taking action.” The first phase, he said, was a new program called Fresh Start, in which Sony promised to remove all trialware and unnecessary software for customers who chose the Fresh Start option as part of a custom-configured VAIO. Sony announced initially that it would charge $49.99 for the privilege of ordering a crapware-free PC and then quickly reversed its decision.

In early May, I ordered an ultraportable notebook from Sony’s website, configuring it to order and choosing the Fresh Start option (no extra charge).

The notebook arrived a few days later, and I’ve been using it since then for a variety of real-world tasks. The bottom line? Sony’s Fresh Start delivers exactly what it promises: a crapware-free PC. It runs Windows Vista remarkably well, and the hardware has been a sheer delight to use. In today’s post, I’ll show you why this VAIO is different from its predecessors and explain how Sony plans to widen its selection of crapware-free models.

No crapware? Really? –>