Sony VAIO VGX-XL201 Media Center PC Clean Install Guide
When I purchased my VGX-XL201 Media Center PC, I fully expected it to arrive preloaded with a myriad of freeware, trialware and Sony-branded software products and I wasn’t wrong. Such is the trend when you buy almost any PC these days, and I don’t doubt that many consumers are very grateful for it. I am not one of those consumers. I know what software I want for any particular job, and invariably it isn’t the software provided by Sony. Also, due to the pace of software development, by the time you receive your PC, most of the freeware software will be out of date, and Sony, like most PC manufacturers these days have a tendency to give you old versions of retail applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements or WinDVD.
In their efforts to make life easier for novice PC users, Sony inadvertently make the process of escaping from the factory installed image difficult, even for competent PC users. They create a hidden partition on the hard disk that contains the factory installed image and provide software to back up that partition to a pair of recordable DVDs. This makes it possible to dispense with the hidden partition and recover the disk space, and also provides the means by which you can extract the essential drivers and utilities that make a clean install possible. What Sony don’t do is give you an OEM operating system CD or any means to install an operating system other than by re-imaging the PC back to it’s factory default settings.
This guide is intended for anyone who, like me, wishes to install the operating system of their choice without the software baggage that comes with the factory installed image. It goes into enough detail that a novice user should be able to follow it, but it is really intended for intermediate to advanced PC users. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could get yourself into a terrible mess by following this guide and of course it goes without saying that I accept absolutely no responsibility for any damage or inconvenience whatsoever resulting from the use of this guide. It is provided in the hope that it will be useful, but it’s use is entirely at your own risk. The guide will deal specifically with installing the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 operating system on a Sony VAIO VGX-XL201 Media Center PC. However, the concepts described in this guide are likely to be largely relevant to similar operating systems like Windows XP Professional, and media center PCs like the Sony VAIO VGX-XL202. When Windows Vista ships in January 2007 I will probably create a new version of this guide dealing specifically with that operating system for the VGX-XL201.
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