T said:
We reformatted my son's Sony Vio laptop yesterday with XP Home Upgrade. The
System Standby By Icon that should appear when you elect to close down the
computer is not operative. It is "grey" and we cannot select this option;
only Restart or Shut Down. The Power Settings options through the Control
Panel does not list System Stand By or Hibernation.
Everything else works fine except the screen brightness option is not
available. This feature may have been a Sony feature? We did not reload
any of the OEM stuff.
Thanks for your advise, assistance!
Regards,
Apparently Sony gave you a separate retail Windows operating system CD,
otherwise you could not have done the XP Home Upgrade. That is a good policy
that I wish every OEM would do; IMHO it keeps a customer from hating the OEM
later if an upgrade can not be done because of an OEM license and with
resultant potential loss of everything on the HDD due to an XP lockout
because of it not being a proper upgrade as specified on the box XP comes
in. I would not buy any PC unless I got a retail version operating CD with
it, it can be a lifesaver if one wants to do an upgrade later without having
to purchase the full blown "Pro" version.
Yes, sometimes laptops use propriatary drivers that are only available from
the manufacture and then only with the operating system that was installed
at the factory. If you find no better answer from Sony support then
repartition and reformat the HDD and re-install the old operating system and
programs in total as it came from Sony, this will assure that you have all
necessary propriatary drivers and that no sneaky system compromisers exist
on teh HDD. You might be able to still purchase the old operating system
"Recovery CD" kit from Sony, although a lot of them prematurely stopped
providing them "because Microsoft no longer supports the operating system"
(which in some cases is not exactly true). Don't buy products from such
vendors in the future, they *could* have kept a copy around for making
copies of at a later time, they just do not *respect* their customers if
they didn't do that. But then, you could have burnt copies for safekeeping,
too... But then, Microsoft could just honor an existing OEM installation as
a bonafide licensed product, too... <rant mode off>
Anyway, don't go online with it just yet after the restoration of the old
operating system. Remove any unwanted programs (the more the better). Now do
an "update" installation with your XP CD. If you want and you have 50 extra
megs available on the HDD, you can go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/howtobuy/upgrading/advisor.asp
to get the XP Upgrade Advisor utility, which will tell you what kind of
incompatabilities will or might exist before you do the upgrade thing. I
recommend it. You can delete the download and recover the 50megs later. (You
could burn the util to CD, and if so why not also go get and include in the
burn the latest freeware versions of AVG (from grisoft.com), ZoneAlarm,
Ad-aware6, Spybot Search & Destroy, SpywareBlaster, and SpywareGuard. Don't
install them until the upgrade is complete. After installing them be sure to
do their updates and to use them.)
Then do the XP Home Upgrade, making sure to have the "full version"
installation CD from the previous operating system. Only the things that the
advisor reported will be not working, turn on the XP built in firewall for
all the devices shown in My Network Places properties, do your updates but
go nowhere online except to the Microsoft update site, install & update your
antivirus etc, and then go to Sony and look for any XP drivers you might
need. The same goes for your printer.
That's the method I'd use to keep propriatary drivers and desired bundled
software that came with a laptop. Good luck!
