ALL VAIO DRIVERS 32/64 & CLEAN WINDOWS INSTALLTION

[chris-kay]

After I had some big trouble to find the drivers for my FW11ZU because I had deleted the recovery partition, I finally found the philosepher's stone - NO thanks to the SONY Europe Support!

To keep it short:

1. If you want a clean Windows, just download an image of the version you purchased with your notebook from torrent or similar and burn it. Then just use your legal product key. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that downloding just the CD/DVD image is illeagal as long as you use your own key.

2. If you want some 10GB more space on your HDD, demolish the recovery partition. I used Fdisk in DOS. But there are certainly many more apps out there.

3. Now go to SONY USA http://www.sony.com and try to figure out which of the notebooks there comes closest to yours. In my case the FW11ZU is pretty equal to the FW290. Then go their support site http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/select-system.pl?DIRECTOR=DRIVER, chose "your" model and download any driver or utility you want and save it to your computer. And no worries: they seem to be multilingual. At least all the newest VAIO Utilities, which you will not find on the European Support page, are in German on my German VAIO.

4. Now here comes the tricky part. Download Universal Extractor from http://legroom.net/software/uniextract and install it. Then start the app and select all drivers and/or utilities you had already downloaded one by one and extract them. You need to do this because otherwise you will not be able to install them as they check for your hardware. After the extraction you will find the actual driver in a subfolder called TEMP...

5. Install everything you fancy, and enjoy your new freedom!!!

6. And if you are not willing to wait for Sony to release the latest graphics driver, just donwload the offical desktop versions from ATI or Nvidia and mod them with the tools from http://www.driverheaven.net.

That's it! If you have any questions or comments, let me know! And go out and spread the word as I think it is just inacceptable that here in Europe the SONY support is just a piece of crap; and that includes e-support!

Cheerio!