Win 7 Pro on my Sony laptop

GregI · 31 Oct 2010 at 13:36

On my Sony laptop I have Win 7 Home Premium installed. Never really used it but now my college has Win 7 Professional installed with Office 2010, I might aswell get familiar with it, and I like the features of Pro (XP Mode etc)

I get Win 7 Pro free from MSDN so the plan would be to install that and get rid of all that bloatware Sony puts on. My question really is that will my laptop be functional after I install Pro? From that I mean have atleast a wireless driver to download drivers from Sony's site for graphics?

scrlk · 31 Oct 2010 at 13:39

Sony are world renowned for the amount of **** they install on their PCs. Driverwise, I would install the drivers from the manufacturers website. You may also need to install drivers for the fn key functions.

Memphis · 31 Oct 2010 at 13:42

Download the latest drivers from Sony before the rebuild and put them on USB. Apart from that, there's no reason why you wouldn't have most functionality.

SiriusB · 31 Oct 2010 at 13:57

The only thing you might miss out on is certain hotkeys - specifically the Fn keys on the top row [brightness, turning antenna on and off etc]. But you can grab specific software from the Sony website.

Aside from that, there is no reason why it wont work as normal with the correct drivers installed.

GregI · 31 Oct 2010 at 14:22

Yeah just wanted to make sure. Just read that original factory drivers are on the recovery cd's anyway so will download 7 soon.

Meatball · 31 Oct 2010 at 14:29

I recently purchased a new Sony Vaio F series laptop which came with Home Premium X64 OEM installed. Before you format ceate the recovery disks using the installed Sony software. These disks allow you to restore your laptop back to how it was when it left the factory. Not only that you can reinstall individual programs and drivers which were installed from factory. When installing W7 Pro you can then delete all partitions, including the recovery partition.

When I installed my copy of W7 Pro I used the disks to reinstall VAIO Update (updating BIOS and firmware etc) and the factory drivers. You can then update them individually using Intel's automatic update etc

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snapdragon · 31 Oct 2010 at 14:32

Meatball said:
I recently purchased a new Sony Vaio F series laptop which came with Home Premium X64 OEM installed. Create the recovery disks using the Sony software. These disks allow you to reformat the laptop back to how it was when it left the factory. Not only that you can reinstall individual programs and drivers which were installed from factory. When I installed my copy of W7 Pro I used the disks to reinstall VAIO Update (updating BIOS and firmware etc) and the factory drivers. You can then update them individually using Intel's automatic update etc .

^^ that's exactly what I did on my old FW21L

GregI · 31 Oct 2010 at 16:40

All I gotta do now is decide if I should buy Office 2010 or stick with 2007. It's so unfair at college. We are following notes for Project/Word 2003, having to do the work on Office 2007 (finding new locations for stuff etc) and now halfway into the course we now need to learn 2010.