When I ordered my Sony VAIO laptop back in January, its spec listed Windows XP as an OS. The box arrived on Feb 1 with Microsoft Vista. This new OS looked nice from the GUI perspective, and I decided to keep it, which was a mistake in the first place. Pretty quickly I “ve installed lots of software, and started to experience compatibility issues with various third-party programs. Vista was too young and the vendors were not in a hurry with updating their software for this new OS.

More importantly, Vista consumes lots of system resources, and its transparent and cool graphics hurts the performance of your system. I knew that I “d be better of replacing Vista with Windows XP, but just did not want to spend a day reconfiguring drivers and reinstalling software.

About a month ago I said to myself, “Enough is enough. I do not see any compelling reason to have Vista, let me get rid of it. rdquo; I “ve formatted hard disk, installed XP, went to Sony “s Web site, found all the names of the drivers, googled them up and installed them.

Boy, I was happy! Windows XP is much fasted on the same hardware than Vista. I did not know that there was a time bomb there hellip; Yesterday, I went to a client to make some presentation. When I “ve attached the projector, it did not recognize my laptop ndash; no signal. Pressing Fn-F7 did not help. They brought another projector ndash; did not work either. Tried another laptop ndash; projector worked just fine.

Now I “m having issues with some hot keys (Fn-F7) that do not work. I called Sony Tech support, and they answered, “This laptop was build for Vista, and we do not have any utilities to make your hot keys work with XP. Reinstall Vista, and we “ll be happy to support you as per the warranty. rdquo;

“But I did not order Vista in the first place, your VAIO just came with it! rdquo;

“You should have returned it back to us rdquo;

End of story.

Lesson learned:

1. Never ever use Vista ndash; it just not worth it.

2. You lose your Sony warranty the minute you install another OS

3. If you are professional software developer, do not purchase Sony Vaio.