Haha I had to figure this one out myself and holy cow it wasn't easy and I have found a way to omit the installation of the dreaded bovine feces that is bloatware for the Vista OS. The HD LED hardly ever blinks.
I even had to replace the optaric drive with an updated one.
So many problems with this laptop and have all been solved without paying Sony to fix it for me.
With all this taken into account I will never ever buy a Vaio restricted/branded laptop or desktop ever again!
Just because this model is a couple of years old you probably won't even find replacement batteries, RAM and other hardware as they just want you to buy a new PC.
