No Back-up Utility on Home Edition of Sony Vaio

[Mark]

The retail stores that sells Sony computers in my area (and probably other
areas as well) all have XP Home Edition. If the OEM vendor(s) would provide
an option to upgrade to XP Pro where you can get the recovery CDs and/or
DVDs with XP Pro on them without a high price increase, I would not mind
paying for it.

I hate the fact that you have to buy a retail XP Pro Upgrade license and
then would need to reinstall all preinstall Sony programs.

 

[Mark]

Depending on your Sony computer, you can create your own recovery CDs/DVDs.
On my Sony PCV RZ34G system with Windows XP Home Edition I created a
recovery CD and DVD through the Sony VAIO Recovery Wizard. The first 500MB
of the hard drive (a hidden partition) stores the system recovery data.

 

[Gordon]

Thanks for that quick information. I don't want to sound
ungrateful, but why should I have to pay $69 when the
Home Edition (non-OEM) comes with a back-up utility? I
guess I'm just not in-tune with Microsoft's policy of not
including all features of XP with Sony, espcially one
that is of such importance.

It's not MS at fault here - it's Sony, deciding not to include it with their
OEM version of Windows.

You can get it here:

http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/ntbackup.msi

 

[rschaal]

I did appreciate your information about the NTbackup utility. I approached SONY support regarding this issue with a relatively ancient laptop that my neighbor had given me. - not the best starting place as it is years old. In any case, after several emails to the first level of support, i reached someone at SONY that knew how to resolve this issue once and for all. - Here is a link to the SONY support page that will allow you to download/install the utility on your VAIO Laptop running XP Home edition.

http://esupport.sony.com/perl/swu-download.pl?template=EN&upd_id=1612&PASSVAL2=SMB

Hopefully, this will solve your backup problems - it did mine.

- Richard