I guess it’s not just Sony. It’s just managing device drivers. Windows 7 has fixed most issues, but man … keyword = MOST!
A friend asked me to upgrade her laptop to Windows 7. It’s a Sony VGN-FJ67C/R. It’s a laptop from China, so you probably won’t run into the exact same one, but you might run into a similar issue with one from here.
So, I installed Windows and it found a few drivers – the ones that were missing were the Wireless network, video, sound, camera, and mass controller. I’ll thank God that Windows detected and installed the driver for the network. Had it not done that, I’m sure finding it on the net first would’ve been a pain. I started with a Windows update, then went through the device manager and started my search for drivers one at a time. The first was the video driver. Ven 8086 and dev 2592 sent me to Intel’s site and told me that it was a 915GM. Unfortunately, Intel didn’t make a driver for Windows 7 on it. Damn it! Searched around a little bit … couldn’t find it. Well, not a show stopper. Let’s move on. So, updates finished installing and I restart the machine. Somehow, magically, the video card driver starts to install. Awesome! Well, I find that the audio driver is installed too. The damn sound doesn’t work though! Oh man … this will be a pain … well, after an hour long exhaustive search (Sony doesn’t have drivers – HP does, but they don’t work), I just go to RealTek.com and install the RealTek HD drivers from there. Magically, it works! It’s Ven 10EC Dev 0260 if you’re interested. That was a pain in the ass! Last, but not least, I had the mass controller – ven 104c and dev AC8E – TI PCI-7×20/6×20. It wasn’t too bad. I just installed the Windows XP driver and it worked! Actually, some site said that they tried it, so I just followed suit. Superb! š
This took a little longer than expected, but man… I guess it was satisfying. š
Hope a person that reads this doesn’t spend as much time as I did! š