Broken Windows

I've been fixing up a Sony Vaio laptop for a friend of Sof's. Having wasted much time on this black hole in the past, I normally avoid this sort of work, but when the missus says "Jump", I say "What colour?" The problem report was to the effect that they couldn't connect to the Internet. However, I quickly discovered the real problem was that Windows had been reinstalled, leaving the laptop devoid of drivers. Pretty much everything except basic VESA video was non-functional, no wireless, network, bluetooth, 3D graphics, sound, media reader, power management, sleep function or modem. Normally this problem can be solved by a visit to the vendor website. I tried Sony Australia first, but they led me to believe that no drivers were available for download. A bit of Googling led me to the Sony APac site, where I discovered a helpful link to the original drivers. All 29 of them. This includes such essential "drivers" as the "Sony Shared Library" and "OpenMG Setup", all of which I downloaded. At about 6 kb/sec. You'd think Sony might be able to afford a decent Internet connection, but apparently not. Installing the 29 drivers solved most problems, although as there were undocumented dependencies between them, I just had to keep installing each one until it worked. The sound drivers wouldn't install, failing with an obscure error message until I found an unofficial download of a Microsoft hotfix that allowed it to continue. I was also asked if I wanted to install in U.S. English, French or Spanish about six million times. Apparently having a system locale of English doesn't mean you wouldn't like your power driver to be in French. Just to liven things up a bit. I imagine that the usual shutdown options of Suspend and Hibernate would be replaced by "Surrender" and "Run Away" or something like that. None of the 29 drivers enable the Bluetooth, by the way. Apparently to get that working you need to edit an INF file. I kid you not. So after all of this, I'm left with a laptop that more or less works. It locks instead of powering off, and the battery never stops charging, but the owners, raised on low expectations of Windows-based machines, will no doubt be delighted. And Sony are supposed to be the Apple of Wintel hardware! Next time some moron spouts that line about Apple needing to license its OS to Dell and Sony et al in order to succeed, just knee him in the nuts.

Posted by Ian Donaldson