I thought of sharing with you all my experience of upgrading a VAIO to Windows 8. I was using a VAIO with Windows 7 Home Premium as the operating system and last month the system was upgraded to Windows 8 Pro. It was a manual upgrade without the support of any VAIO utility, the reason behind manual installation is that I was not aware of any new support offering by VAIO for their existing laptops to upgrade to Windows 8. Normally I get a mail, if there is any offer from VAIO. Everything went well and Windows 8 installed successfully. It was a fresh and complete installation.
After a couple of weeks I was listening to some music and suddenly the player crashed and the system rebooted. The same weird things started happening even when I watched movies or played my favorite single-shooter games. The VLC player crashed, problems existed in switching screens, some Wi-Fi network related messages were popping up, the card reader did not read properly and even the external hard disk was not being detected properly. The Driver Management listing even shows some of the drivers as corrupted. I checked with my friend who also has a VAIO with the same configuration that I have. He also encountered the same issues from the first day itself when we installed a new copy of Windows 8.
Initially we thought the problem might happen because of Windows 8. We re-installed Windows 8 again on his system but still the same issue occurred again. I decided to visit Sony VAIO forums and search for the threads that discuss Windows 8 upgrades. A very few threads have good answers for the problem. When we do a manual upgrade to Windows 8 we need new or updated VAIO drivers. One thing I want to emphasize here is that the old versions of most of the VAIO software or drivers (those used for the previous operating system) are of no use any more now, which means it will not provide any support for the new operating system.
Sony VAIO offers a direct way to upgrade to Windows 8 if you are a valid customer and the laptop you bought has the offer to upgrade to the new operating version. The VAIO upgrade utility will take care of the entire installation and will upgrade to the new operating system. But I am not going to discuss this here now because my laptop does not come with that offer. So I needed to buy a new copy of Windows 8 and do the installation. Now for those of you who have already done the upgrade manually, don't worry, VAIO also supports you.
Visit the VAIO Upgrade website, and download the upgrade utility or tool; it comes to around 200+ MB. Go through the instructions given in the website. Once the download completes then run the executable file that will scan the entire system and start downloading the necessary software and drivers.
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This will download around 90+ of the latest necessary applications (3 GB), depend upon the various VAIO versions. The default save location is "C:\Win8Upgrade". Once the download completes, we can start running the installations.
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A series of multiple system reboots will occur for each successful installation. Finally after reboot, you will get a congratulation message from the upgrade tool.
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That's it, hope this will help everyone.
Thank You!