F11 Weird Brightness Issue, been trying to fix for 3 days...

Help?
I bought this laptop recently and have been doing all the driver/windows..etc updates over the last few days.. My laptop is stuck at either very low brightness (auto brightness setting puts it at 0%), or very high brightness (auto bright off).

Both are extremely uncomfortable and unusable.

The symptoms
**When I use the brightness keys, I can only make the sony's slider overlay go between zero and one. Computer is registering my attempt at changing the brightness, but even going between zero and one has NO effect on the actual brightness. All of my other FN keys (volume..etc) are working.**

Clues?
NVidia panel has a brightness setting, but this is different from the FN-key controlled brightness. It doesn't actually make the screen dimmer - it just changes the way things look... it still strains my eyes at the lowest settings.

I've searched the web for hours and hours, and only found One other thread with the same issue (no solution of course).

Fixes I've tried based on similar issues others had / esupport recommendations
- reinstalled the Shared Library
- reinstalled Event Service
- updated NVIDIA drivers through Vaio Update
- reverted NVIDIA drivers through Vaio Care
- updated all Windows 7 updates
- updated all Vaio Update updates
- looked through all Vaio Control Center options
- looked through NVIDIA panel, selected "Other applications control color settings"
- ran vaio one click care and resolved all issues
- ran vaio keyboard check
- ran vaio software / hardware checks
- reinstalled many other probably unrelated Sony apps from vaio care Recovery/Restore
- looked for hkserv in startup, but it doesn't exist on my computer at all (but the rest of my keys are fine, so I think this is not related)

 

I hate to ask the obvious after you've given so much detail, but you didn't say so directly.

Have you disabled Auto Brightness?
S1 > Display > Automatic Brightness Settings > Adjust brightness automatically

This does not seem to be your issue, but I wanted to be absolutely clear here.

 

My best guess is that it's the "updated" nVidia drivers. Did you update with one obtained from another source besides Sony eSupport?

The brightness controls won't work correctly if you don't have the extra Sony stuff in the video driver's inf file. That extra stuff is usually model/panel specific and depending on where you get the driver you might not have the right info for your panel. If you don't, the driver doesn't know what brightness settings your panel supports and/or how to command it. Even the nVidia provided releases that say they support Sony don't support all Sony models.

I'm guessing this is your problem because the brightness keys seem to be functioning OK, otherwise you wouldn't see the brightness slider appear. It sounds like the driver doesn't know your panel's capabilities/settings, which is something I experienced before when trying to find a working Win 7 driver for an older Sony laptop.

What I would do is uninstall the current nVidia driver, reboot, and then install the original one from the recovery partition/DVDs. You can also grab the driver from your model's Sony eSupport page, but there have been instances where eSupport had the wrong stuff so the safest bet is to start with the original driver that shipped with your computer.

You could also scour the laptopvideo2go site and the internet at large learning how to modify the driver's inf files and how the Sony-specific inf entries work. But believe me, it's not worth the effort unless you have no other choice.

 

thanks for your thoughtful response...

I have the same suspicion that it is either a NVidia driver issue, or something caused by Windows 7 after an update, maybe the interfaces between.

I never manually downloaded/installed video card drivers, all I did were through the Vaio Update program. I just used the recovery & restore in Vaio
Care to reinstall the original NVidia drivers, but the issue persists after restarting. The Sys. Info shows the driver version as 187.83.

I'll try to dig deeper into making sure the drivers were rolled back, but it doesn't seem like this is the solution... Any other suggestions?

 

I re-downloaded the original & updated drivers from sony VPCF115FM home page. After uninstalling NVIDIA and restarting, I still see the NVIDIA control panel, which says that the driver version is now 188.67 -- higher than the ones before the uninstall. I no longer see an option under Programs & Features to uninstall NVIDIA...

also found the same symptoms for a different computer... they were caused by some windows update, and resolved by reinstalling the drivers... but I couldn't fix it on my laptop yet
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-inspiron-dell-studio/437213-dell-studio-1745-cant-adjust-brightness-2.html

Any help or suggestions appreciated. I'm surprised that it is so hard to find examples of this online for other Sony laptops, since I didn't tinker with the drivers or installation...

 

Three words of advice: sequence, sequence, sequence. The function keys are very prone to issues if things are not installed in the proper order. This includes, but is not limited to the shared library, setting service, event service, device driver etc. Not sure about the specific sequence for an F model, but I would venture a guess it is the same as the FZ series. And you can find Coolguy's (Rajesh) in a thread about a clean install of Win 7 on an FZ model. You may very well need to uninstall the current Nvidia driver and install a "proper" one from Sony or one modified for a Sony install. To uninstall it you go into device manager and uninstall the device. You will find an option about deleting the old driver and you DO want to do this. If you don't, the old driver will be installed the moment you reboot. After deleting the old driver and doing the requisite reboot the system will run with a stock VGA driver and then you can reinstall the proper driver.

But remember the there words of advice: sequence, sequence, sequence.

Link to Coolguy's thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/429745-windows-7-clean-install-guide-vaio-fz.html

Gary

 

Well, I don't have the answer either, but since you've tried reinstalling the drivers from Sony already, you could try updating to the latest NVIDIA drivers for your model from the NVIDIA site. That would be version 260.99 I believe. Go to the NVIDIA site and plug in your model and it will lead you to the latest drivers. Several people with F11s have done this without a problem. Of course, that may not solve your issue, but it shouldn't hurt either. You can uninstall your current driver in Device Manager like stated above.

The last resort, of course, is to start over by doing a factory recovery to original software and wiping everything. If you're sufficiently frustrated by this, it may be worth it to you though.

 

Unless there is something DRASTICALLY different between an FZ and a F model, there is no need to resort to wiping everything and starting over. What does work on the FZ (and the other two models of Vaios I have owned) is to uninstall the driver (back to a VGA default driver), the shared library, setting utility series and the event services and then reinstall them in the proper order. As for the driver from Nvidia, without it being modded for the Sony specifics, most of the time the stock Nvidia drivers don't work with the function keys. Coolguy (Rajesh) can provide more details, he's the go to guy here on the topic.

Gary

 

That NVIDIA driver is supported by SONY for the F series for the 310 and 330 GPUs, which are the only choices on an F11, and does work with the function keys, it's just not on the Sony eSupport site.

Edit: If you want, you can look here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-260.99-whql-driver.html
Click on the supported products tab and read the note at the bottom of the page

 

Solved...
It seems that dmk's suggestion about the NVIDIA installers and modified INF is correct, but the LaptopVideo2Go forums weren't up to date with Sony information. When I scoured these files, I did find some suspicious registry entries that seem related to these issue. It's quite interesting to go through the inf files... but luckily i didn't have to delve too deep.

After fixing seeing that uninstall wasn't properly working, here's what I did:
- uninstall once more through Programs / Features
- use DriverSweeper, suggested in Guru3D forums
- uninstall from Device Manager, with the option to delete the actual driver installer files
- re-scan to make sure windows recognizes no trace of NVIDIA drivers

Finally it came up as "Standard VGA", and that's when I used the "original" drivers available from Sony's site rather than through the Vaio Care application.

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EDIT: I just saw all the responses... Looks like you guys were putting me on the right track, thanks for all your help -- these forums are truly a quality place... repped!

 

Glad you got it working.