I purchased a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ195N/X for the head of our school. It ran so slow and crashed all the time, even though it was brand new and had 2GB of RAM and a Solid State harddrive. The solution. Wipe it clean and do a fresh install of Windows Vista from our school’s volume license CD’s. Everything went great. The Microsoft install was fast. I downloaded and installed a series of drivers from the http://esupport.sony.com page for my Vaio. The machine flew. I could not have been happier. That is, until I tried to connect using the internal Sprint broadband card. It would not work.
I called Sony. They said the reason is they do not have publicly available drivers for the Sprint Broadband card and they do not have a copy of the SmartWi program that switches the power from the Wifi card to the broadband card. Actually, the first Sony tech support guy did not know anything. He just kept saying, “that is not in my database”, whenever I suggested other solutions. The second guy, said I should not have done a clean install and that I had no options and had to do a system install. The third tech was a Sprint tech guy who was very helpful, but could not solve my problem, but he gave me a different Sony tech support ph#. That lead me to a very helpful Sony tech who was able to diagnose the exact issue and was willing to go off script and try installing other drivers from the TZ 190. So what was the end result. The lack of the exact SmartWi program, which switches power from the Wifi to the Broadband card, was preventing me from using the Broadband card. The solution, restore the machine, created a Dual Layer dvd recovery disc, reinstall Windows Vista, and then extract the drivers and programs I need from the recovery DVD. I will let you know if it works