VAIO TZ - Driver questions

Hi guys,

I thought I would sum up all my questions in this one thread. Believe me I have read through more or less all the TZ threads but I am still a bit confused.

I have placed an order for the TZ90 in Japan and will be installing Vista English when I get it.

Here goes:

1) According to many of the postings, it seems there is a recovery partition (hidden?). Can I use the Japanese drivers from the partition after I have installed Vista English instead of using the US drivers? There was one user of this board who wrote this was possible, but I have read no other posting confirming this. If I can avoid it I'd rather not do the model.txt trick or use the universal extractor.

2) If the above is not possible, how do I properly use the files extracted with the Universal Extractor? I can see there is a "Checkmodel.exe" amongst the files when I extract one of the Sony drivers. Is the best way to run the Driver executable file from within the extracted files (assuming it will bypass the checkmodel.exe) or should I install the driver from Device Manager and point towards the folder with the extracted files?

I am sorry if I am asking a lot of rookie questions but please bear with me. I appreciate all the help I can get.

Just want to be as well prepared as possible for when I get my little baby

Thanks a lot,
Katinka

 

It won't be easy to install xp and keep it stable,the truth always comes form practice.

 

XP??? Thanks for the advice, but I am going to install Vista.

 

Can it really be that out of the apparently many Vaio TZ owners, no one can answer my questions? Please help.

 

You can use Japanese drivers on your English OS, since drivers are language independent, but it will be difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve them from the hidden recovery partition, which is only used to restore a whole operating system (Japanese Vista in your case) to factory defaults. It would rather be much easier to download the appropriate drivers on Sony's website and install them one by one. However, Sony's Japanese website does not offer downloads to all the necessary files needed for a clean Vista installation, only updates, so you must use some drivers and utilities from other models. Note that most Sony downloads have filenames ending with these denotations:

-JP - Japanese language
-UN - Multi-language or English language
-US - Multi-language or English language

If you stick with -UN or -US files only, you'll be fine.

After extracting with Universal Extractor, if a setup installation is included with the driver (such as the audio, bluetooth, intel chipset and video drivers), it's best to use that, otherwise install the drivers from the device manager.

 

Thank you very much Bogart!