SONY vaio... aaarrgghh!!!

[TheRift]

Got one of the boss' SONY vaio VGN-CR42S sitting here. His kid put a big ass magnet next to the thing annihilating the damn drive. New drive in, and proceeded to install Windows7 Home Premium 64-bit.

All went fine. Some drivers just could not be found, and SONY only have 32-bit drivers. Had to install HP driver for the card reader.

Windows update happens today and it installs the ATI X2300 video driver. I notice the brightness of the screen is now reduced, so I try the Fn-F5/F6 buttons and just nothing happens.

Been looking for a fix for this for the past couple of hours. Not much luck.

Rollback the driver to just VGA driver and the brightness is increased, but still no working Function buttons.

Buttons for "AV Mode" and "Capture" do nothing. Haven't been able to find the video capture utility either. Unless ofcourse the capture button is working and someone's going to find a gazillion snapshots in some arb folder on this machine all of a perplexed looking me flipping the thing the bird.

Managed to get the volume keys to do their thing by installing the HotKeys app.

Never had a hassle with SONY, but there's always a first time I reckon.

Anyone have issues like this with their SONY? Anyone suggest a fix apart from chucking the thing in the pool?

 

[MadMailMan]

If the thing is insured then the pool is not a bad option. I don't know anybody with a Vaio that is really happy with it. Big disappointment as I am a HUGE Sony fan.

 

[Sackboy]

I presume it didn't have Win7 on before. Maybe try loading the OS it had on it and then upgrade from there?

 

[TheRift]

Yeah, don't have the vista installs. The drive I pulled from it had nothing on. No driver disks, no nothing.

I'm a big sony fan too, but lately not been impressed.

It has to go back tomorrow, but I'll try and organise to get it again and pop in a Vista install then upgrade to win7 from there.

Where do I get the vista install from though? That's the question.

 

[Spazmatic]

just a thought, but have you maybe tried loading the vista drivers?

 

[TheRift]

Yip. Loaded vista drivers where I could find them. Some won't go because they're 32 bit. Unfortunately, no luck on getting those buttons to work.

Notebook has been handed over today anyway and compared to how it arrived here I think they'll be happy with it.

Just frustrating handing something over which is not 100% functional.