Quick Web Access on VPCEA290x after SSD upgrade

I'm trying to get Quick Web Access to work on my new VPCEA290. From the factory, Quick Web Access worked. After installing my SSD drive (very fast, very nice, btw), the error message I get is: "Quick Web Access is not installed on your system, or the installation is incomplete". Yes, I have done the obvious thing and installed Quick Web Access (several times, in fact).

Here is the sequence I followed:

1) install new SSD drive
2) use recovery discs to re-install everything using "Restore Complete System"
3) EXCEPT that I selected "Do not keep VAIO Value-added Contents as part of the recovery drive". According to the instructions, I do not need to keep the VAIO Value-added Contents on the recovery drive if I have already created recovery discs. This saves about 12GB of precious ssd space (my SSD is only 60GB).
4) after this, the Quick Web Access button does not work

I have verified that both c:\SPLASH.000 and c:\SPLASH.SYS exist and are populated with files.

I've tried explicitly re-installing QWA from the recovery discs. I've also tried downloading the version of QWA from Sony's support website and installing that. The recovery discs created a (seemingly useless) 100MB partition which was marked as active -- I've tried deleting this partition and setting the C:\ partition to be active (plus installing the Windows 7 boot manager onto c:\ so that I can still boot properly...).

One possibility is that the Quick Web Access on VPCEA290 does not run from c:\, but rather runs from the recovery partition. If so, the Sony Recovery Utilities are wrong to state that they can re-install the Quick Web Access without modifying the recovery partition. However, this possibility seems unlikely to me (except that it is the only thing left that I can think of). Further, the recovery partition doesn't appear to be NTFS format (whereas I think Splashtop expects NTFS, based on other posts on this site).

I can't find any obvious options in the BIOS settings related to QWA.

Does anyone have any other ideas to try, or know what might be wrong?


[Granted, given that the SSD boots in ~22s, I could live without QWA, if that were the only option left...]

Thanks,

 

Try THIS version, it was originally posted here by thonhi months ago for use on an EA series, I put a SSD into my Vaio EB series and forgot to make recovery discs, I installed this version and works great.

However other than once to test it after installation never used it again due to:



This is without disabling services or startup items, however I have disabled the windows 7 loading animation, set boot timeout to 0 secs and enabled all cores for the bootup in msconfig.

 

No luck with that version, either. I found it had to be set to run in Windows compatibility mode to install, since it would tell me to defragment my disk otherwise. After installing, QWA still gave the same error message about not being installed.

I've also tried the EP0000207216.exe version from here and still get the same "not fully installed" QWA error.

My boot time is now about 18/19 seconds vs your 12s. Enough incentive to keep looking for ideas on what's wrong with QWA!

 

Hmm strange that it didn't work, I just a clean windows 7 install rather than recovery discs, I notice you also said they originally made a seperate 100mb partition for something, perhaps this is why it isnt working for whatever reason.

A clean install is pretty easy, windows 7 finds all the drivers you need the only ones I was missing were the intel storage ones which you can find on the support page for your machine.

 

I've found that the 100MB partition is related to Windows 7 -- it's used for Bitkeeper (although created even if you're not using Bitkeeper) and also for some Windows recovery files. So I suspect now that the 100MB partition is unrelated to the QWA problem.

Unfortunately, at this point, I don't think I want to go through another full install without good reason to believe it will fix the QWA.

It would be nice if I could find more documentation on details of how QWA is supposed to work on this particular laptop (flash+hdd vs hdd only, details of boot process, what does the motherboard/bios expect, etc).