Martin Notes

Ok, I’ve done it. I installed windows 7 on my viao vgn-tz21mn as my main OS. I dumped Ubuntu to join the mainstream.

First of all, why did I dump Ubuntu? Well, there were three things that bothered me:

1. It doesn’t integrate well into my working environment. I receive loads of MS Office files that just don’t work properly in Ubuntu. Open Office gives some possibilities, but it just isn’t enough. MS Word files are screwed when they are more complex than just plain text, Powerpoints look horrible when you edit them and Visio just can’t be edited or viewed at all. And, finally, we use Exchange 2007 at our company which still just doesn’t work with Evolution.
2. Battery life. Ubuntu somehow still doesn’t work as long without power as Windows does. I have nearly 7 hours with Windows and Ubuntu doesn’t give more more than 4. Since I got the Sony primarily for it’s portability, this is an essential point for me.
3. Support for multiple displays. Ubuntu just doesn’t support multiple displays correctly. It improved over the years, but it’s not stable at all. A small thing that annoys me: the Gnome icons in the panels won’t stay in the same spot when you change the resolution of the screen.

Installation

So now I installed Windows 7 Ultimate.

It took me ages to create a USB stick which I could boot from. I found a manual that works, but I had to reformat my stick to NTFS to make that work. Somehow a FAT32 filesystem just won’t do. Very irritating and, from my point of view, very unnecessary.

As soon as I had figured out how to create a installation USB stick the installation itself went as good as you expect with Windows. It’s still messy and slow, but it works. It sort of detected the hardware and installed a decent set of drivers which works. There are a couple of things that should have worked better though.

The driver for the graphics card was not the latest version. It didn’t even get updated when running Windows Update. I had to manually go to the Device Manager and select “Update Driver” to make Windows realize that it had to get the latest one. Really, really weird. Then there is the touchpad. It works with the standard PS/2 mousedriver, but it doesn’t support scrolling. Apparently Windows relies on the drivers to supply this feature. After a lot of searching, since Sony doesn’t support Windows 7 on this machine (it so old: 2 years already) I found out that I had to install the ALSP driver to make that work. I still have to work out how to make all the shortcut keys work. Volume works ok, but the brightness doesn’t.

Ah well, Ubuntu recognized everything correct during the installation and Windows, the hardware support Meister, messed up a bit. I wonder how people with less computer knowledge fix these problems? Probably they don’t, because they don’t notice them…

Windows

So now I run Windows. It runs pretty smooth and the ‘new’ Aero stuff looks quite cool. The improvements on the taskbar bring it close to being actually useful and after installing Dexpot virtual desktop manager I can even work with multiple desktops.

What keeps surprising me with Windows is that each update still leaves so many issues open from previous versions. The Device Manager for example: It is still the same as it was in Windows XP (maybe even 95, I don’t remember). It doesn’t show the hardware that your computer contains, but it shows you the Windows drivers view on that hardware. A huge difference, because Windows doesn’t always detect the correct hardware. It doesn’t even try to help you. I’ve got two “?” marked hardware entries and I had no idea what they are. After going to the “Devices and Printers” control panel (beautiful name, by the way) I found out that these are the media slots that the Sony has. Ubuntu also had some challenges there, apparently Windows also doesn’t understand them.

Somehow everything in Windows feels clumsy. I can’t help but feeling with everything I do in Windows that it could have been done much more efficient. During my search for drivers I had to visit the Microsoft driver center which required me to install an ActiveX component. This only runs in IE so I had to switch browsers first, then IE alerted me that I had to install an ActiveX, then Windows darkened my screen and alerted my that I wanted to install something and finally AVG (virus scanner) alerted my that somebody tried to install something. All of that only to find out that the driver I downloaded didn’t fix the problem.

I think Microsoft should abandon the whole GUI they have now and redesign the thing from the scratch. It’s not unusable, but it’s just not something I’d expect in 2010.

Sony

I have to make a comment about Sony and their support. Why don’t they publish the hardware that they stick in their machines? That would make finding drivers so much easier and it would remove surprises like I had: my wireless card can’t handle wireless N…

If the driver support at Sony would be brilliant then this would not matter too much, but there is room for improvement there also. There is one Windows 7 driver for the tz21mn on their support site: the Sony Update tool which keeps their Sony software up to date. Erm, right… I don’t have any Sony software on my machine, since you don’t supply it!

Apple

Maybe this Windows 7 exercise is the last push I need to switch completely to Apple. Although my recent experiments with their Airtunes also didn’t make me happy (I’ll write some more about that later). At least the Mac OS X GUI is consistent and offer feature I need. Their support for MS Office and Exchange is pretty ok, although Visio is still missing.

It seems there is no perfect solution at this moment, it’s just like the real world: I’ll have to live with imperfection

Ubuntu