Vgn-FE41M runs XP without problems.

[lapenass]

Well,today it took me about six hours to install XP on my Vaio, and now it runs well I mainly used driver and utility package of VGN-FE31M only with several exceptions. Camera driver I installed is an original VGP-VCC4 driver (Ricoh) for VGN-FE41M. But I instaled it specifically by executing MS-DOS batch file. Somewhy it is only able to capture video in 320x240 resolution. Also I had some problems with brightness control as it was showing brightness changing when pushing Fn and brightness controll buttons but nothing was happening. It was due to nVIDIA driver, in my opinion. After reinstalling it all went OK. What else? Memory card drive's icon was terrible, but after reading some threads here I managed to make it look as a normal Memory Stick Icon . I recommend installing Memory Card Drive Registry Patch which is to remove that fake SD/MMC Drive from system. Also there were some problems with the Bluetooth as Windows actively refused to recognise it (showed UGX but did not find driver for BT nor did it let me properly install Toshiba BT Stack for Windows). After modifying bth.inf Windows successfully installed Microsoft Buetooth stack and now it works flawless. By the way, I did not install all of those Sony utilities, just four:
1 SonyUtils DLL
2 Sony Shared Library
3 Vaio Event Service
4 Setting Utility Series. These are needed for hotkeys to work.
Over next few days I will see if downgrading was successful

P.S. It is best when drivers are installed over Device Manager by updating device driver.

[Thalamus.]

Hi lapeness.

Thanks for the info, I'm sure it will be of use to others..

[Geoff_33]

Hi lapeness,

Thalamus gave me the link of your post. I hope you are stil coming often here and will be able to help me. I just need some more details to solve my problems.

First, for the brightness. I have the same problem you did. Can you tell me which driver you used and where you found it? I installed the same four utilies like you so I assume my problem is in the nvidia driver.

The second point, concern the fake SD/MMC drive. As well I would like to know where you find the link of this patch.

I had no problem with the bluetooth using the FE31M package driver but maybe you could as well give the instruction to modify the bth.inf file.

I'm trying to make a little guide for the download and describe it in order to install drivers and utilities properly to have a nice operating system. Only the software will then missed but the base will be good.

Thanks in advance.
Geoff.