Vaio SZ Laptop - Slow with Vista and 7 - faster HDD??

[amdowney]

My 2 year old Vaio SZ laptop became fairly sluggish with Vista so I have recently tried Windows 7 - and I'm just not finding it much faster! Also due to no Sony driver support it also freezes at times.

I think though I have identified the bottleneck, the HDD. The 5200Rpm Toshiba drive hits about 44 MB/s in HD Tune and for not much more money one can pick up a drive the hits 80 Mb/s now!

I was considering installing XP but on realising this I'm willing to bet a clean Vista install on a new HDD will be a major improvement, with the OS differences being minimal.

What do you think?

 

[baarod]

My 2 year old Vaio SZ laptop became fairly sluggish with Vista so I have recently tried Windows 7 - and I'm just not finding it much faster! Also due to no Sony driver support it also freezes at times.

I think though I have identified the bottleneck, the HDD. The 5200Rpm Toshiba drive hits about 44 MB/s in HD Tune and for not much more money one can pick up a drive the hits 80 Mb/s now!

I was considering installing XP but on realising this I'm willing to bet a clean Vista install on a new HDD will be a major improvement, with the OS differences being minimal.

What do you think?

Definitely do a clean install of Windows 7. As for missing drivers, which ones? We have a fine track record of finding drivers here! Also, consider getting an external enclosure for your old HDD. They can be had for about $20 and you can still get some use out of the old drive as a data/backup device.

 

[amdowney]

Sure but do you not think that upgrading the HDD will make the biggest improvement? I may be OK with Vista on the laptop and not need to shell out - tests show Windows 7 is marginally faster than Vista no?

 

[baarod]

Sure but do you not think that upgrading the HDD will make the biggest improvement? I may be OK with Vista on the laptop and not need to shell out - tests show Windows 7 is marginally faster than Vista no?

On older hardware 7 is markedly faster than Vista. Test it for yourself on the new HDD.

 

[FZ21Z]

A new 7200rpm HD will make a significant difference, so get one bought and stick Windows 7 on it. And yes Sony support is quite poor, but due to the excellent user support found online, the majority of issues are quickly resolved.

Windows 7 Build 7000 on my Vaio SZ680

 

[solarboy]

I also get the freeze with W7 32 bit with all the Sony Vista drivers installed. I still find it faster than Vista and XP though. I have tried all 3 OS's with identically installed programs and 7 wins hands down. Just once a day or less it freezes and needs a hard reset.
Sony should be ashamed really.

 

[Frostmourne]

I also get the freeze with W7 32 bit with all the Sony Vista drivers installed. I still find it faster than Vista and XP though. I have tried all 3 OS's with identically installed programs and 7 wins hands down. Just once a day or less it freezes and needs a hard reset.
Sony should be ashamed really.

Hard freezes?

 

[solarboy]

Yes Hard Freezes

They are very random, sometimes various times per day, sometimes not for weeks, but always when scrolling in Firefox. The mouse pointer will freeze but everything will stay on screen, there will be no hard disc activity at all, Ctrl Alt Del does nothing, pressing the power button does nothing. I am forced to hold down the power button. Sometimes on reboot the OS runs Checkdisk, and/or asks if I want to start in safe mode. No errors are recorded in any system logs, it's as if someone pulled the battery out. Strangley I didn't get them with the Beta or the RC or build 7048, just the RTM.

 

[Frostmourne]

They are very random, sometimes various times per day, sometimes not for weeks, but always when scrolling in Firefox. The mouse pointer will freeze but everything will stay on screen, there will be no hard disc activity at all, Ctrl Alt Del does nothing, pressing the power button does nothing. I am forced to hold down the power button. Sometimes on reboot the OS runs Checkdisk, and/or asks if I want to start in safe mode. No errors are recorded in any system logs, it's as if someone pulled the battery out. Strangley I didn't get them with the Beta or the RC or build 7048, just the RTM.

Did you upgrade to 7 or clean install? If its an upgrade, clean format 7 and then install the latest 7 drivers from Sony's website.

 

[solarboy]

Sadly, Sony didn't provide drivers for this model, even though it is less than 2 years old. They recommend using the Vista drivers but say they provide no support for this. MS provided some drivers through Windows update but some of them break functionality.

 

[solarboy]

It was a clean install, it is not possible to install W7 rtm over W7 RC without hacks.

 

[PeteC]

Although my notebook is a HP Pavillion, so I can not state that experiences will be "identical", a couple of observations?

I installed Win 7 on a 2+ year old HP Pavillion. HP's web site did say that my model was Win 7 capable, however, there was only one actual Win 7 specific driver there to download!

Having said that, it turned out that all the other current Vista drivers were perfectly compatible with Win 7 (64 bit at that!) with the sole exception of the Pavillion's "Quick Start" keys...and as it turned out there was an update from MS for that anyways.

You do not say if your win 7 install was a "clean" or as they now call it "custom" install, or merely an upgrade or not. If you simply did an upgrade, this may be significant, becasue whatever caused your computer to become sluggish in Vista, very likely still exists!

Though Win 7 is lighter on it's feet than Vista, your computer did not "become sluggish" due to Vista, rather there is some software issue somewhere in your system causing this behavior. My laptop does run somewhat "snappier" with Win 7, but frankly, it never ran badly with Vista either...I suspect (but, you never know!) that you have some software conflict somewhere in your system causing this slow behavior.

No offense to any other poster here, but even though a 7200rpm hard drive is a bit faster, that really should not be the problem with your system. Hard drives either run...or they do not, they do not gradually slow down. Sure a faster new hard drive will tweak your overall performance, but in and of itself that will not be a night and day difference...far more likely, and far more cost-effective would be simply to do a clean install. XP, Vista, or Win 7 on a clean install will likely return your notebook to good working order. XP is phasing out, Vista is OK, but definitely a bit pokey, Win 7 really is the "New Sherriff" in town...and I say that as someone who really had no big issues with Vista!

Edit: If this was a clean install, then the next thing that I would suspect would be other programs, particularly programs such as Roxio (older versions), or as in my case, Acronis. When I first went to Win 7, I had frequuent, hard to pin down problems, that turned out to be caused by Acronis 2009...as soon as I deleted Acronis (and replaced it by a very good free disk imaging back up proggie), all the dodgy behavior went away...