SVE141290X keyboard backlight

Hey there! This is my first Sony, and so far I really like it, except that the backlight for the keyboard is insane and I just can't get used to it.

My problem is somewhat twofold: the machine shipped with Windows 8 and I decided to roll it back to Windows 7 due to personal preference. (I have a machine at work that runs 8. It's really not intuitive to me.) I ended up loading a clean install of 8 as well, because I have the ability to, so I figured why not; even if I never boot into it, it's there.

So what I basically have is a machine with a Win7 clean install that dual boots a clean 8 because I can.

I downloaded and installed all the drivers for the machine from the support site, and I downloaded but had not installed any of the software suites. The drivers for the 290X didn't all work, so I went ahead and downloaded the drivers for the 190X to replace those on the Win7 partition. (the win8 partition installed everything just fine.)

Then, I realized I utterly loathe the backlight. It's very intrusive, especially in lowlight situations when I'm trying to surf the web using the keyboard. I looked up how to turn it off, and was directed to the Sony Hotkey Utility. I installed it; it decided my battery wasn't compatible. The keyboard control didn't appear in my control panel as I would discover it does in Win8. I laughed, used system restore to roll back the install (nothing new had shown up in my installed programs list so a basic uninstall was out of the question.) and tried using the 190X version, which simply refused to install.

Thinking it might be a firmware setting, I went into 8, installed the utility, and successfully changed the parameters. The change worked, and I thought it had taken on the 7 side as well, right up until my backlight started blinking everytime I shifted position. It's odd-- my ambient light hasn't changed any, so the fact that it's working again after several hours of being disabled doesn't make sense.

I can't find anything in the BIOS (I accessed it using the "assist" key, couldn't figure out how to activate prior to the POST using the function keys) and, I can't even find the usual settings for a laptop keyboard in the BIOS (such as whether function keys do F1-F12 or if they do the printed action by default). I did switch from UEFI to traditional because I couldn't install Win7 on a GPT no matter what I tried, which might account for any/all/none of this.

I was wondering whether anyone else had had this problem and either had a surefire hardware way of disabling the LED (I'm not actually averse to dissecting the thing and ripping out the LEDs in the keyboard) or a fix for the Sony Hotkey Utility install so that I can actually use the software controls.