Published on by

Well, I have this notebook, Sony VAIO VGN-FW190E and after wrestling with Windows Vista which came with it, and trying to make it less irritating and annoying I finally gave up and installed Windows XP SP3 instead.

Got all drivers, everything set up but there are some issues. Battery life is one of them -- Windows XP sucks life out of the battery like some venerable vampire. That is, unless you install Sony Notebook Control Utilities.

I did that and I regretted it. Sure, I could set the power management into the finest details, contol LCD brightness, use special keys, etc, but it added at least one service, about five background processes and two icons to the taskbar notification area. Now I could have convinced myself to live with those, but it also killed my WiFi connection!

I first suspected that it has something to do with drivers since I was using the latest Intel WiFi drivers from their website, so I tried to install the ones provided by Sony. Apart from adding yet another useless taskbar notification area icon and another background process to eat resources it didn't fix the connection issue — WiFi card remained in a zombie state where it could not detect any networks, and diagnostic utility was failing the first test saying the card is disabled.

Good thing is that since I was expecting trouble, I had a registry backup at hand which I made just before the installation of Sony's crapware. After a reboot I had a clean system again... only the WiFi still didn't work!

Yes, Sony's crapware killed the WiFi card so thoroughly when I installed it that I had to power-cycle the notebook to restore it to working state. Bad Sony, no cookie!