Sony attitude about Serie FZ and Drivers XP

[jesnche]

Hi everybody!

First of all, sorry for my poor english, I'm Spanish.

I'm writing this post because I want to understand the sony attitude about XP Drivers with FZ Series.

Sony doesn't offer XP Drivers for FZ's laptops but recently, Sony published XP Drivers only for VGN-FZ19VN. I asked to Sony support and they told me that it's because client complaints. Obviously I sent a complaint to sony support about it.

When you visit "Support - download Area" and you choose VGN-FZ19VN laptop to download drivers for this model you can found a section for downgrading your laptop to XP Operative System, then if you click this link you can read the reason that Sony offers to us to offer this drivers: ( You can read the page here )

Sony tell us this ->

"As SONY considers customer satisfaction of paramount importance, we have decided to provide you with a number of drivers and / or utilities in case you wish to downgrade the original Windows Vista™ Operating System to Windows XP™ Professional SP2"

Well, my question is, What is the reason to offer XP drivers only for VGN-FZ19VN laptop? The others Sony clients are not important for Sony? I think all sony clients should have the same rights and, for example, the others users of FZ laptops also need/want this drivers. We have spend, more or less, the same money. And Sony can't force us to use Windows Vista!

What do you think about this sony attitude? And what do you think about Sony offers only Windos Vista drivers without told us when we bought our laptops?

[mikur]

Hi

Having a VGN-SZ5 XWN/C I have the same worry as you. I see that since a few days all (?) the driver are on the ftp site of sony for the computer SZ4/SZ5 but I don't know if it is a good thing to downgrade. What about all the soft preinstalled ? and the peripheric like the biometric unit ?

[jesnche]

Well, you should decide what is most important for you. The SO o the preinstalled software, I don't know if you can't install it in XP, are you sure that you will lose this soft in XP?

The most important thing is that anybody force you to use a specific Operative System without tell you before, when you bought the laptop.

[brunof]

Hi

Having a VGN-SZ5 XWN/C I have the same worry as you. I see that since a few days all (?) the driver are on the ftp site of sony for the computer SZ4/SZ5 but I don't know if it is a good thing to downgrade. What about all the soft preinstalled ? and the peripheric like the biometric unit ?

mikur, I have an SZ4 and I downgraded last week, all went fine. If you look into those zipped archives, you'll find that fingerprint reader drivers are there, and also some Sony and chipset utilities required to detect onboard hardware (webcam, bluetooth, etc...) but you'll lose all value-added preinstalled software.

Backup your system burning the recovery CDs if you plan to delete the huge restore partition and to be able to quickly bring back Vista in the future.

HTH