Got my new SR25 black yesterday pc fair promo with free bluetooth laser mouse, bag, dvd player, towel and ms office home & student. Damn worth it considering that Sony products are always overpriced. Useless Sony bloatware was a put off though So I spent hours trying out ways to do a semi clean reinstall only to find out that existing methods based on the SZ series do not work since the recovery software is different now. Here's my technique, based partly on http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4180371

1) Copy c:\Program Files\Sony\Vaio Recovery out to a thumbdrive
2) Run Vaio Recovery and choose Restore C: drive
3) The system will reboot and enter recovery mode
4) Wait until the progress bar completes
5) The system will reboot again and startup Vista
6) Once you see the Windows logo, get ready!
7) A window will appear on the top left corner showing Installing VAIO Recovery or similar. QUICKLY do Ctrl-Alt-Del, start Task Manager, go to Processes tab and KILL VAIORecv.exe!
8) If done properly, Vista should resume its normal install and setup
9) Once Vista is ready, copy the Vaio Recovery from your thumbdrive back to the hard disk and run it
10) Choose Reinstall Programs and Drivers and install the Intel Wireless driver and Vaio Mode Switch (to get the special buttons working). And anything else you find useful (personally I think the rest are unnecessary)

Congratulations, you now have a slimmed down install With all necessary drivers and no crappy bloatware. Runs way faster. In case you screw up the steps and Vista can't start, no worries just hold down F10 during boot and it will start recovery mode again.

Wow run Crysis You can try Gpu-Z to check whether the video card supports DX10. If not, Crysis should be able to run on DX9. Vista by default should already have DX10 installed.

Not sure about ati driver.. it could be already installed after recovery.

VAIO Control Center has a 'Battery Care Function' that you can enable. This limits the charging to 50% even if its plugged in. Great feature

Recovery partition already exists on your hard disk. The recovery dvd is just a copy of it. The partition is a 'hidden' partition, but it appears in windows as another drive when you run VAIO recovery. When you close VAIO recovery, this drive magically disappears again.

Your hard disk may be going to sleep. Go to Control Panel, Power Options Advanced and set it to a longer time before it sleeps.

Not worth upgrading to 4GB ram if you're not using 64-bit Windows. Normal Windows cannot use all 4 GB of your ram.