Sony SZ Brightness Controls In Windows 7?

Hello, I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 on my SZ5. Was surprised at how much works out of the box (fingerprint sensor, drivers etc) but the one glaring bug I found is that when I close the lid and the monitor shuts off, when I reopen it the brightness controls (FN+F5 and FN+F6) no longer work. I also notice that the brightness controls in Windows' power options Control Panel disappears. I need to restart my computer to resolve this (similar problems by other users: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=380872&page=2 ). Does anyone have a solution? Thanks!

 

for the "when I close the lid and the monitor shuts off" problem, u can go to the battery/power option to configure it.

 

I've already left it as 'Do Nothing' as always. Yet the monitor still shuts off

 

it is still probrobly going to hibernate. i think do nothing effects sleep only, not hibernate. In any event it sounds like sleep / hibernate is not working properly if the brightness controls no longer work. usually when this happens its due to the video drivers. if you havent already, i would install the latest windows 7 video driver available from either ATI or NVIDIA depending on what video card you have.

its a shot in the dark, but the only time ive had sleep hibernate problems was due to the video card driver i was using.

 

Thanks a lot for your help. The nvidia drivers unfortunately dont work for sony laptops so I am stuck with the base drivers. I've tried laptop2go but my Aero gets disabled and brightness controls dont work at all? Has anyone else with a Sony looked into this?

 

I did.

I am using the "original" Sony driver which was released for vista 64bit drivers, without sony vaio control buttons. I click on the battery icon in task bar and change brightness there.

what i found:

- closing the lid messes things up and brightness control does not work anymore
- going into hibernate is OK
- going into sleep is OK

So I did a bit of googling on how to disable the shutdown lcd when closing the lid and found an interesting device unde device manager: ACPI Lid.

Guys on another forun said we need to replace this device with something else, because disabling it will not be OK. So I replaced it with "volume manager" and it seems to work since then!!

I will do some more testing and if this works as it should I will go and fix the control buttons.

 

Great find! I wonder if anyone has found out more?

 

did every driver and utility worked for you for windows 7?

 

Well....it is working now and i can set the brightness via control panel no matter what happens to my laptop (sleep, hibernate, etc...)

The only problem now are the FN buttons, I cannot get them to work anymore and I do know they used to work ...

oh..and yea...the camera is not working, but i dont care about that, TBH

 

Everything on mine works. Just the brightness controls after closing the lid.

 

Would you care to explain how did you get the fn buttons to work for brightness? what to install, what to configure?

 

can anyone make a guide on how to setup Windows 7 64bit on the SZ6-7 with the drivers?

 

Please don't thread jack.

 

So i've tried using the latest nvidia drivers from laptop2go. The Sony hotkeys dont work properly but the screen brightness int he power options control panel still does, until I close the lid....

 

bump. anyone?

 

Aside from the S1 S2 keys not doing anything this is the last annoying bug left in my Windows 7 install.

I've been doing some investigation, and it seems like it's definitely the Vaio Event Service that's causing it. Disabling VES in services.msc before closing the laptop then re-enabling it after opening it keeps the brightness control working.

Since Sony has decided to make the new VES (4.0+) not work on the older VAIOs (FE/SZ), i wonder if there's a way to replace certain DLL's such that the old VES doesn't cause this problem?

 

What exactly is VES for? Can we keep it disabled?

 

Follow up: I just tried this - my brightness Fn keys stick to max (though the screen is definitely not at max brightness) even if I disable VES before closing my lid.

 

VES is the program that monitors the Fn keys and shows the little brightness thing on the screen.
Did you rightclick -> stop on VES? If so it might have something to do with the SZ's stamina/power modes, since it works fine on my FE.
Anyways, I did a little more testing, and it seems like if the brightness gets stuck, you can stop VES, close the lid, open it again, and re-enable VES and it will work again. What a strange bug.

 

Strange. Yeah mine is set to Speed (Nvidia).

Interesting, because the adjust screen brightness disappears when I close my lid (which also disables the FN screen brightness keys).

Restarting and reopening lid as mentioned in yours doesn't fix my screen brightness problem. Only way for me is to restart.

 

Hi guys.
I have the same problem with my Vaio SZ5XN. Brightness controls using FN shortcuts don't work after resuming from hibernation or sleep USING THE CLOSE LID option. I have found a workaround by disabling "choose what closing my lid does" (setting it to , do nothing,) and then programming the S2 button to sleep or hibernate. For some reason that works? I also found out that when the computer automatically sleeps or hibernates after selected minutes then everything is fine. The problem only starts when closing the lid.
Furthermore, this is associated to the Nvidia drivers because when in stamina mode then everything works fine.
Anyone having problems with dll error when going into Power Options-Change Plan Settings-Change Advanced Power Options-and selection the Vaio Power Option TAB? I got a dll crash when doing this ONLY when a VAIO Power Plan is selected. Worked fine when Windows Power Plan selected. I upgraded the Sony Power Management from 2.0 to 2.2 (version 3 removes some options) and that fixed the problem.

 

Which version of Win 7 did you upgraded to?
I have SZ4 and I upgrdaded Vista to Win 7 prof.All shortcuts work. After reboot, hibernate, whatever...At first I was happy..

However my WiFi sometimes turns itself off, and also i can't edit some power saving schemes. Today I had blue screen. Also, i just closed the lid, thinking that my laptop will go to sleep mode... NOT. When i came back in a minute screen was dark and fans were running on full speed...

 

I upgraded to Professional. No problems here.

Anyone got any updates with regards to the brightness controls? perhaps an updated custom nvidia driver from laptop2go?

 

Put in the Nvidia registry patch (the SZ750 uses it if yours does not), that will probably fix it.

 

Cool. do you have more details of this registry patch?

 

Any more thoughts on this very annoying issue? The registry patch from the 750N thread fixes it after a reboot but only until you put it to sleep again

 

I'm running 7 Ultimate on an SZ160P and am not able to get the brightness keys to work at all, even before a lid close. Any ideas?

 

has anyone resolved this issue or have we learned to just deal with it?

 

One thing I have found and so have others is that not every install works the same. You can put everything in, and it all works perfectly. Repeat the same process, same order of install, and certain things don't work exactly as they should.

Always start with a clean install, and if it isn't perfect try again. If you keep getting the same result then you're probably stuck. Sony doesn't offer support for what we are doing, it's all a lot of research and trial and error.