This week, I got a chance to play around with my nephew's brand new laptop Sony VAIO VGN-Z47GD. It is featured with 6 GB memory, 320 GB hard disk, NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS graphic adapter, Blue-ray Disc, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth Ver 2.1+EDR, Gigabit Ethernet, among other amenities. It's thin, lightweight, cute, and fancy.

I've tested briefly all its networking hardware: connecting its voice/fax modem to a phone line to get a dial-up Internet connection, plugging a 3.5G modem USB dongle to access Internet using WCDMA/HSDPA network, linking its Wi-Fi to my home wireless router, transferring large files to another computer using its Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

The Microsoft Bluetooth stack is pre-installed along with Broadcom's Widcomm stack to run the Alps Bluetooth radio on a Windows Vista Business 64-bit. Both Microsoft and Widcomm Bluetooth software work side-by-side. For basic profiles (object push, serial port, HID, HCRP, DUN, PAN), I use the Windows' built-in Microsoft software. For other profiles such as headset, audio gateway, FTP, and A2DP, I use the Widcomm software which is integrated seamlessly into Windows Vista's Control Panel and Windows Explorer. A connected Bluetooth device has its own control center which looks like Network and Sharing Center.

I was confused at my first try to send/receive photos to/from a mobile phone and a Blackberry. I was looking at the Bluetooth taskbar icon and right clicking it to find Send a File and Receive a File to no avail. Finally, I sent an image file from the Pictures folder by right clicking the file name and select Send To Bluetooth device. To receive a file, I opened Bluetooth File Transfer Wizard. It is located under Accessories. Well, I needed about half an hour to find this solution. Why Sony hides Send/Receive a File from the taskbar menu remains a question. As indicated in some Internet discussions, it turns out that many VAIO users were stuck with the same problem, that's being unable to send/receive files from/to VAIO at their first Bluetooth try.