Dear All,
Just lately there have been many questions re. graphics drivers on the A-series laptops. I thought I would try all of the main driver options on my VGN-A115Z, one after the other, using the following games:
Half-Life 2
DOOM3
Command and Conquer Generals
Simcity 4
Quake III Arena
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
The drivers tested were:
Standard Sony Driver (factory installed)
Modded Catalyst Driver (4.11 latest from ATi web site)
Tech Magazine Half-Life 2 modded Ati driver (suggestion of TygerType)
OmegaDriver 2.5.90 (Catalyst 4.10 Beta) - NOTE: this will be updated next week with the drivers based on Catalyst 4.11!
These are my findings:
Standard Sony - CRAP, DOOM3 and Half-Life 2 only work for a limited time and then stall! They also run relatively slowly! 
Modded Catalyst - Would still not install correctly even after running the mod tool! 
I have succesfully installed the modded 4.10 driver, but the perfomance boost over the above is negligable (it's does'nt hang as much though!) 
TechMagazine - Installed OK... ..but made absolutely no difference compared to the standard Sony Drivers! DOOM3 and Half-Life 2 still hang in the same places (which seems to coincide with large amonts of HDD data retreival).
Omega Drivers- Installed OK, and all games run flawlessley! The games also run faster! The only issue I have noticed is that if I start the laptop and then do nothing for an extended period of time (several hours) the graphics do break up and then correct... ...but then the screen update is slowed. However, that is the only issue I have seen and when do you usually start the computer up only to do nothing with it?
Winner (on my system) the Omega Drivers! :smileygrin:
It will be interesting to see how the new ones perform after their release next week! http://www.omegadrivers.net
Hope this helps!
CW
PS buy the way, I have had no graphics driver problems on my PS2... ....ha ha! 
Well reading through this forum has really dampened my mood. I'm trying to install a game on my laptop and everything passes the test except the graphics card, I have OpenGL 1.3.4063 WinXP Release and I require 1.4.0 (its a IGP 345M) so I've spent all day looking for updates and drivers and such and getting nowhere, and now I find out Sony don't do any kind of updated drivers for it? I assumed it was because I had some weird model (I haven't been able to find anything about the model mine apparantly is, PCG-9P7M).
I've seen some of you guys mention Omega drivers, should I give them a go 
The game is Knights of the Old Republic, everything else on the laptop passes the recommended tests with ease, I'd be very dissapointed if I couldn't run it simply because of the opengl drivers...
PCG-9P7M
This is Sony's internal model number, look for a little badge on the right hand side bottom of the LCD screen for "PCG-K115B" which is your actual model number - I have the same computer.I've seen some of you guys mention Omega drivers, should I give them a go
Depends. Its up to you but this is at your own risk and do NOT use the overclocking facilities because nothing causes a graphics chip in a notebook to fail faster than overclocking...
Thanks for the model number, that kind of explains why I couldn't find a single thing out about my laptop
[:">] I'm not that experiened with updating drivers and things so if the Omega ones are risky I don't know if I'll try them, would it be easy to ensure the overclocking facilities are turned off? Thanks for the reply by the way.
Well I bit the bullet and tried using the Omega drivers, but it seems even though they have been installed they didn't upgrade my opengl and its still the same as before So the game was just the same, sluggish and pretty much unplayable. If it cant update my Opengl version, is there anything that can?
I tried the TCMagazine drivers but at the start of installing the display driver it said I didn't have the correct display adapters, yet as you said before we have the same computer and I believe I read you tried these drivers, any ideas why they don't work for me?
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