deleting Vaio from Sony computer

[Broadback]

Can I simply delete Viao from my Sony computer and then load a fresh Windows 10?

[Martin Brown]

Sony (and Toshiba) portable kit has a bad tendency to have customised hardware drivers that can result in problems/loss of some bespoke functionality if you do a generic reinstall with a bog standard Windows.

Sleep, suspend and battery saver features are one area of concern.

Whether these matter to you is another matter. Portable PCs it is usually better to stick with the manufacturers approved OS installer and their own drivers intended for the model that you have.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I can confirm that my Toshiba C55 at least happily takes linux with no need for any other software.

[Martin Brown]

I have never found Linux on Toshiba portables to be a problem (apart from one where there was a physical hardware problem with the keyboard which was what I wanted to test) - it loads reasonably sensible default generic drivers. The same cannot always be said for Windoze.

Latent faults might not show up if you never use sleep, hibernate timeout or suspend modes. Portable makers do some pretty odd driver tweaks to maximise battery life - it is these features that you tend to lose. (and or unreliable USB devices after the machine has been asleep)

[The Natural Philosopher]

My tosh does go a bit weird under whichever mode it is that saves the state to disk and shuts down.

In particular a USB attached DTV dongle jams up and needs to be disconnected and reconnected and the receiving program shut down and restarted.

Previously an acer laptop would suffer video failure on resume when using Nvidia drivers rather than nouveau. Screen states were not saved by the proprietary drivers.

In practice these have not been hugely serious issues.

Power saving under the battery power seems well enough handled by latest releases on Mint/Ubuntu - I confess I have not explored all the possible combinations of shut down suspend, sleep and hibernate offered to test every one. Indeed I am not actually sure of the difference ;-)

Wifi comes back up as it should.

As far as keyboard mappings and mouse pad handling goes, the C55 laptop behaves better than expected, with every function key and te mouse pad doing the expected thing.

My general impressions that whilst not as rock solid as a desktop most reasonably modern generic laptops will run Linux perfectly well.

I kept a windows partition on mine, but in 18 months have never used it.

PS. something I discovered when replacing the charge cable socket, is that if you cant get into the BIOS any other way, to get it to boot Linux, removing the battery causes it to throw you in on next power up to set the system date and time. This can be exploited to access the rather limited set of BIOS options - IIRC there as a need to ensure the correct boot mode to boot linux via GRUB etc.

I hope this helps someone.

[Brian Gaff]

Depends on whether there are drivers for the hardware available in Windows

1. Brian

[Capitol]

I have never had a problem with Ubuntu 10,4 on my Dell Mini as the only operating system.

[Brian Gaff]

One thing to try then is get a cheap hard drive, and swap them and try an install on that. At least then you have not burned your bridges as you still have the drive. Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

The first thing to do is try a live DVD. If the hardware all seems to respond correctly you are 90% there.

[Bill]

In message , Broadback writes

I suspect the answer is: Probably, if it was previously running a Vaio'd version of Windows 10. Especially if there are drivers out there.

I believe that Sony are no longer in the laptop market, which may be relevant.

I once had a Sony laptop. A nice man in Ireland said "Yes, the one here does it, too". He gave me a phone number to raise the issue with Sony HQ. That number led to another number, and another. Then I was back with the man in Ireland again. I gave up and sold it. Never again.

Why does anyone think that saying Linux works on a Toshiba laptop answers the question?

[Huge]

[15 lines snipped]

Well, obviously it doesn't, but it implies that;

- Windows is shit, especially Windows 10, which is both shit and spyware.

- Sony laptops are shit.

- Sony are lying devious scum, who should be prosecuted for distributing root kits purporting to be audio CDs.

And hence the correct answer to the question is "Throw away the shitty laptop and get a proper one with a decent operating system."

[The Natural Philosopher]

If you read back in the thread the first responder said that Sony and Toshiba Laptops were somewhat of a laws unto themselves. My response was the first that said 'but Toshiba laptops are not a law unto themselves: they actually work very well with a standard distro'

I don't think mine has any special drivers at all.

I know it didn't help the OP with his Sony, but it at least might help someone who is considering buying a Tosh for linux use, as I did.

[Alan Dawes]

As others have said your problem will be drivers. You have not said which Sony Viao you have as between 1996 and when Sony sold the Viao devision in Feb 2014 there wer 100s of versions many changes to hardware requiring new drivers. Although Sony no longer own Viao they still have support pages and a quick browse suggests that if it was one that came with win 8.1 then drivers are available but earlier ones are less clear cut. Use the model number to check with support eg:

Even then you may have to do upgrades to the present windows version rather than remove the old and instal win 10 to ensure compatability.

It also seems others have problems with older versions of Vaio. If you google ther are quite a lot of hits eg:

Alan

[mechanic]

Yes, that'll help the OP no end.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well it might as it might actually be that a Linux install instead of Win10 would be a more successful use of an old sony laptop.

[dennis]

They are running linux on a desktop and feel lonely.