Vista’s DRM plus the Sony paranoia over content piracy are a toxic combination – performance is terrible, files won’t open, peripherals won’t work and the hard drive crashes

I’ve been struggling with my big (initially) beautiful Sony Vaio laptop since the day that I bought it, back in late February.  That in itself was a real pain – I bought a new laptop because I was embarking on this new career in international multimedia consulting, and the promised delivery date from Sony stretched and stretched until it was only two days before I was scheduled to leave when the computer I was going to use for the presentations finally arrived.  Which, in itself, led to many of my disastrous early problems that nearly led me to hurl this $2,800 computer out of a 7th floor window like a Frisbee … and come to think of it, had I actually done that, my life might have been easier.

Anyway, the reviews are starting to trickle back in, and the fact that manufacturers are bringing back new machines with XP on it is very telling.  The marketplace is speaking, and what they are saying is that Vista is unusable.  If Microsoft is smart – as opposed to manipulative and crafty – they will listen to this, and rush out a service pack (one is rumored to be in the works already) that addresses these issues.

But in the meantime, Vista has been an absolute disaster to my fledgling multimedia business.  I have been unable to work with any of my existing media files because of the DRM. I think that the combination of Vista and Sony hardware is particularly toxic; Sony has been so freaked out by the way that the illegal downloading has cored out its music business that they have put their hardware divisions into a vise to try to make sure that users have no way to use their Sony machines to pirate content.

I’m not sure if the software guys were strangling bunnies or what, but they got their desired result. Sony hardware works with Vista to constantly police your conduct. Big Computer Is Watching You.

Of course, what this means in the real world is that Sony hardware has been so badly crippled as to be useless. The Vaio computer line equipped with Vista spends so much of its time and effort attempting to police your conduct that there are very few clock cycles left to actually accomplish whatever tasks you set it – for example, despite running on a dual-dual core setup, my Vista machine is slower than my ’02 vintage 2.53 Ghz machine running XP.  That’s the kind of performance hit that professionals just cannot take – and in this, case WILL NOT take.

That’s not even to get into all the files that simply won’t play or even open on a Vista machine, because the default position that Vista+Vaio take is that your content must be pirated unless the OS is told otherwise. Thus, a movie that I wrote, produced, directed and edited is assumed to be stolen!

Coming soon: screenshots of the attempted repair on the Vaio and the not-so-fond farewell to this lemon when I boxed it up and shipped it back to Sony.