I’m forced to use Windows Vista, because Sony was simply incapable to deliver a Windows XP Downgrade as advertised that WORKED

with their latest Carbon notebook Sony Vaio Sz71

One of the zillions of problems I found, as solved today was that Microsoft application like Outlook couldn’t connect to localhost (to retrieve mails via a local spam filter working as a mail proxy.

Long story short, just disable the whole IPv6 stack and

• make Microsoft’s applications find “localhost” again

• save about 200 MEGs (!!!) of valuable memory… my Vista is down to “only” 650 MB after reboot (it started with 1050 MB)

To disable IPv6 in Vista, use regedit to access:

> > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\tcpip6\Parameters\

create a DWORD key named: DisabledComponents

set the key value to “ff” (in hex)

REBOOT.

You can use IPCONFIG /ALL at the command line to see the difference in network drivers being loaded before and after… I had about 8 devices there in addition to WLAN and LAN adapters… after reboot and above fix only the two physical adapters were left… and lot’s of memory saved.

And outlook and other apps are able to connect to localhost again.

Good grief – I wish Sony would have accomplished a working XP setup…