Sony Vaio VGN-Z and fresh Win7..please help!

Hi guys.

I hope you can help me out please.

I have just received my upgrade for my VGN-Z21WN/B (my baby, love it!)... anyway, I did a bit of research before receiving it and everywhere I read suggested to do a fresh install - so thats' what I did. It actually all went okay, and it's happily running.

I visited vaio-link.com where I found some Win7 drivers, including:

- Bluetooth driver
- Realtek HD audio
- BIOS update for Win7
- Ethernet Driver
- Fingerprint suite
- Wireless LAN (Intel ProSet)
- WWAN
- nVidia graphics driver

All great , except now I am missing my FN keys. The FN keys for brightness, volume, switching display etc no longer work, and I cannot find a solution. One site I researched says to download the vista driver, but I cannot find that anywhere .. and then even people said that didn't work.

Secondly, although not a biggie, is there a VAIO Update driver?

Any hep you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot!

 

There are alot of threads in this forum to show you how to get your Z working with a fresh Win 7 installation, I could see 3 or 4 of these, surely you couldn't have missed them.

From what you said, I think you missed installing VAIO Event Service version 5, because that what handles the Fn keys. Then Sony Shared Library, Sony Setting Utility (I think this one for the GPU switching)

It didn't take me 30 seconds to find these:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=342562

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=431357

 

Ah thank you for that! I was mostly looking on Google and didn't do a search of this forum, sorry about that.

I have managed to install the preinstalled stuff, and everything seems to be okay (no errors coming up). The FN buttons work again..except for the brightness/ FN+F5 and F6 bring up the brightness toggle but remains on one box - I can't move it.

Any ideas? Thanks again.

 

If the Fn for volume works, don't know why it didn't work for brightness. Which mode is this problem on? Intel (STAMINA) or nVidia (SPEED)?

 

On the SPEED one is where I've tried. You know, I also had problems with other drives too - my system suddenly went to slow, so I decided to use F10 on the BIOS to reinstall a factory Vista, and then installed Win7 with the upgrade instead.

I seem to have mostly everything working by itself, except again, no FN button functionality...

~Thanks!

 

Okay, just to let you know where I am. After doing the upgrade, I went onto vaio-link.com and just downloaded the one thing from "preinstalled drivers" called VAIO Event Service.

After rebooting, the volume, mute, switch display all seem to work okay. The brightness now only lets me change one bar (not sure what's wrong with that!?). Eject seems to work too.

Secondly, do you know how to install HDD protection again? I can't seem to see this anywhere on my PC, although I saw the driver. However, that driver contains no setup or .exe file

Thanks a lot for your help!

edit: is this actually normal for an upgrade not to have the hdd shock/fn workking?

 

you need to read the threads on this forum. ALL those problems have been addressed.

you need to install the new BIOS and the new nvidia driver form the sony europe site to get the brightness working. search the forum for the instructions. there are at least two step-by-step walkthroughs.

 

Okay, I have located those - thanks for the pointer. I see about having to install the nvidia uninstaller first and the new BIOS before the new nvidia driver.

What I'm asking though, is it normal for an upgrade to have these issues too? I can see why my fresh install had them, but surely the upgrade shouldn't? I am just wanting reassurance something didn't go wrong with my upgrade and that it's a normal thing for these not to work after an upgrade.

Thanks again!

 

i thought you did a fresh install? if so, why would it really matter what the upgrade-path does?

 

I did to begin with yes, and when I started manually applying those patches it all went a bit wrong. as I mentioned above, I then decided to backtrack to Vista (using the F10 on the BIOS) which gave me a factory installed Vista, uninstalled all the crap that came with it, and then did the Win7 upgrade instead - but having these problems:

- no vaio update
- FN keys not working for brightness (i'm about to try that new graphics driver though), but works for volume. Also S1/S2 don't work - as there's no Control Center to specify what they do
- No HDD sensor protection like there was before

I'm just hoping my upgrade didn't go wrong, otherwise I'll have to do it again. If it's normal though, hopefully sony will get fixes out soon