Yes, the Sony machine has a few design issues (like why is the headphone socket not on the front, but right next to the Blu-Ray drive so the plug & cable get caught when you open the draw?) (and why is the keyboard not backlit?)
BUT, since I've been running XP on this for well over a month, the machine has become very useable and stable and I've not put my desktop on for weeks. I only ever hibernate and sleep the machine and it does fine. Admittedly, I have to reboot it after a few weeks whereas my old Acer would go for months, but this seems to be just down to the Marvell Yukon driver which is VERY buggy. Everything else is fine. I've dealt with other peoples notebooks and many (including Packard Bell and Toshiba) are terrible machines with Vista on and I've helped those users upgrade to XP and are now very happy. At the end of the day, if you don't use Vista for much (some email & surfing) you'll be fine. If you really want to *USE* a computer, you have to move to XP. I get a much longer battery life since moving to XP as well !!!
Sorry, not had chance to finish the guide. I have a LOT of files and I went through a lot of different drivers and registrys so it's all a bit messy to put together. It's a powerful machine and has not failed to perform any tasks from playing 3D games, blu-rays, DVDs, movies, compiling DVDs, transcoding video for various devices.
If only Sony (who, as usual have their head in the sand and terrible after-sales support) would listen and put together an XP pack. Don't forget, Windows isn't the only option. Linux Mint runs rather nice on this 😉
