FW Touchpad not working with XP

Does anyone get their touchpad fully working with XP? Even after installing Sony Synaptics driver from Sony site, mine still only works like a regular mouse and there is no option to control the tapping. And it is odd that according to Sony site, you will get Alps driver for Vista and Synaptics driver for XP.

 

Works fine on my Z.

Perhaps try the other driver?

S

 

The VAIO FW uses Alps touchpad, thus you should only install Alps drivers
the OS does not change the hardware that the FW is configured with
it is indeed odd that sony would tell you to install synaptics drivers o_o

 

1. Try to find out the alps touchpad driver for XP of another vaio model. I don't remember exactly which model I downloaded in sony esupport. maybe SZ series
2. using uniextract to extract this driver.
3. go to device manager, uninstall synaptic touchpad driver and restart
4. go again to device manager, install new alps touchpad driver. (specify the extracted folder that you done before.)
Tested in my FW140E. Full functions of original FW touchpad.

 

Does the Sony support site not have an FW Alps driver then?

S

 

Hey Master Q,

I realize this post is old, but decided to give it a try. I recently "downgraded" my FW140E from Vista to Win2K3 Server Standard Edition SP2 (optimized as a Workstation) and almost everything works beautifully, plus no low count half-open number of TCP connections limit as in Vista and XP SP2. OS is super stable, very fast and well behaved, most apps start up and close instantaneously, etc, so I'm extremely happy so far. Plus most XP drivers I've tried have so far been totally compatible with W2K3.

I still have the notebook in dual boot config (with EasyBCD) until I can resolve the very few remaining issues. One of them is that I have an "ALPS Pointing-Device for VAIO" under Vista, but under W2K3 I get a "Synaptics PS/2 Pointing Device" with very limited touchpad functionality (no scrolling on the pad, and no way to disable tapping, which are the most important for me). I mostly use this machine with a Microsoft 5000 Notebook Bluetooth mouse so mostly it does not bother me too much, but when I'm not sitting at a desk, not having the touchpad scrolling feature is a great pain in the posterior.

Since you have the exact same machine as me, can you tell me where you got your ALPS driver from? I used the XP driver provided at the Sony support site, which is identified as being for Synaptics pointing device anyway. So it looks like Sony is intentionally trying to deprive XP "Downgraded" users of having access to the ALPS full-function touchpad. I searched at the ALPS website but there seem to be no drivers there, and Synaptics doesn't offer any other alternatives then the driver functionality level I've already got.

I also had to look around for alternatives for most other device drivers from Sony too, because of the same limitations, so there definitively seems to be a pattern trying to impose limited functionality on devices under XP. Fortunately the FW140E is basically an Intel Cantiga GM45 Montevina motherboard with a Series 4 Chipset, so it was not that tough finding the right drivers to restore full device functionality.

BTW, my only other remaining issue is related to the Memory Stick and SD/MMC card readers, which seem to be installed properly as they are shown with no issues in the device manager under the IDE ATA/ATAPI section, but in the Disk Drives section they are shown both with the dreaded yellow (!), and the reported error "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". If anyone has found a solution to this please let me know. I've tried a number of Ricoh drivers but so far none seems to have been able to resolve the problem.

As a reference, I've attached a screen capture of the device manager window.

 

OK it worked for me, problem solved. Re-read your post, and followed the instructions. Now for the sake of clarity in order to help the next guy with this same problem here's what I did:

1. Found pointing device hardware ID: ACPI/SNY9001 = Sony Alps Pointing

2. Downloaded the VGN-SZ140 "ALPS Pointing Device (Touchpad) Driver and Control Utility" driver at Sony esupport:

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VGNSZ140&upd_id=1993&os_id=7

Filename : ALDOTH-00199338-US.EXE
Version : 5.3.512.4
Last Modified : 09/29/2005
Size : 1.67 MB

3. Then extracted driver files from the ALDOTH-00199338-US.EXE driver with the Universal Extractor utility, removed Synaptics driver, then clicked on update driver and pointed to the ("ALDOTH-00199338-US\TEMP\Driver") folder that was created and where the extracted files where placed during the extraction process. After reboot now I got back my fully functional ALPS Pointing Device for VAIO. Now, why would Sony want to make it so difficult for us?

Thanks for the tip. Now on to solve the Memory Stick/SD Ricoh card reader issue.

BTW, when I'm done solving this, I'm planning on putting together a complete XP/W2K3 driver package for the FW series, and post it for download.