VGN-AR21S Purchase experience

[Sirnig]

I have just made my first VAIO purchase of the AR21S having come from a 5 year-old Dell Inspiron 8000 which was very reliable but now almost state-of-the-ark.
My first AR21S bought fom John Lewis was returned for a refund within 3 days due to dead pixels, a dim right-side of the screen and excessive light-bleed along the bottom of the screen; I also suspect it had a faulty blu-ray drive as it made a rough mechanical noise on each boot-up. The return experience with John Lewis was superb (no, I have no connection with them other than as a (now) satisfied customer!)...no quibble, pleasant, polite and unlike most/all other retailers they give you 28 days from purchase to make a return. Despite this poor first showing from Sony, I still liked the machine enough to persevere and I ordered up another from JL. This time, the AR21S screen was perfect as was the disc drive...in fact it seemed like a different model such was the difference between the two. After loading up the 2 x 100GB drives with personal software I then discovered to my horror that in Win Media Center there was no connection to the installed AverMedia TV Freeview/Analogue Tuner card...the WMC menu had a listing for My TV but it reported no Tuner was installed. Checking Device Manager in XP told me the opposite...the card was there and the drivers were properly installed. I could not find a way to get the two to communicate. I ended up rolling the system back using the hidden partition on the VAIORecovery Suite, thereby hosing 3 days of instal work. However, this did the trick and the software hooked up with the hardware TV card at last. So far, it's working well and picture/recording quality is superb.
It is a pity that the fantastic quality of this AR21S machine is let-down by poor quality control from Sony before these machines leave the factory.
I am also disappointed Sony do not supply any installation discs whatsoever for the installed software which makes problem-solving all the more difficult for their customers. Note also that unlike the previous CoreDuo AR11S, there is no HDMI cable supplied with this machine( come on Sony, this is a bit mean on a £2000 machine!).
Summing up, not a great showing from Sony's QC but the AR21S is a truly superb machine once you find a perfect one or manage to get it the way it should have been in the first place.

[hello90]

Hi, The answer would be greatly appreciated to this

Your above tip was amazing it enabled the center to work again after

not working after a vaio recovery was needed .

Problem:

on configuring: I selected one signal sender which isn't powerful enough, it turns out,

and then because I had to turn off the pc and go out, I finished the configuring

(configure tv tuning ) - now the option to configure tv tuning seems to

be permanently blocked - but I need to start all over

to try the other signal stations!

It seems crazy to block a re-tuning., in my case I had to shut down the pc

but in others - for example what if you move house and have to re tune - it should be

possible to re-tune

Would a repeat of the steps you supportively gave us in 2006

work, to enable a start from scratch, or would a repeat risk harming the VAIO VGC-VA1

All the Best hello90

[hello90]

meaning this , thanks Sirnig

Aaron Stebner at http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/02/17/534559.aspx
in which he says:-
"Troubleshooting steps I use for Media Center component registration failure errors