0Drivers for Windows 7 on Sony Vaio FZs

This is just a quick post to men­tion an excel­lent guide I recently used when installing Win­dows 7 on an old Sony Vaio VGN-FZ31Z laptop. I was hav­ing sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fi­culty installing sev­er­al drivers, in par­tic­u­lar those for the nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (hard­ware ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0425&SUBSYS_9005104D&REV_A1) which was stub­bornly remain­ing a “Stand­ard vga adapter”. Sony don’t provide any Win­dows 7 drivers, and the gen­er­ic nVidia drivers don’t recog­nise the hard­ware ver­sion in the Vaio, instead offer­ing the unhelp­ful error “The NVIDIA setup pro­gram could not loc­ate any drivers that are com­pat­ible with your cur­rent hard­ware.  Setup will now exit.”  There is no good reas­on for this — the drivers have been dis­abled in soft­ware purely because OEM’s like Sony don’t want users installing drivers from nVidia that they (Sony) haven’t checked on their spe­cif­ic hard­ware con­fig­ur­a­tion. This would be under­stand­able if Sony actu­ally bothered to provide sup­port for their old hard­ware, but since they don’t this situ­ation really isn’t acceptable.

I’ve run into this kind of issue before — with ATI hard­ware, and used the ATI mobil­ity mod­der to resolve it. There is also an nVidia mobil­ity mod­der, how­ever this did­n’t solve the prob­lem — attempt­ing to force install the mod­ded drivers just gen­er­ated a new error: “The driver selec­ted for this device does not sup­port this ver­sion of Win­dows.”  For­tu­nately after much search­ing I found a guide by Cool­Guy on Note­bookRe­view which included clear instruc­tions and a link to a mod­i­fied file which enabled me to install a driver. The driver sup­por­ted is bang up-to-date (301.42 at time of writ­ing) and, more import­antly it works, which is what really mat­ters in this case. Many of the oth­er drivers linked from the guide were also really use­ful, and best of all the guide is still being updated — the most recent update was 2^nd June 2012 — only 10 days before this post was published.

Thanks again to cool­guy