FN buttons work not,

[Arbetsgivarn]

Hi all wizards of computing at Sony,

please make. me. believe. That I will ever buy another Sony product again, by solving this supposedly simple problem. Since I, myself, am not a wizard of skills parallelled by the wizards at Sony.

Anyway, I have the ever so frequent VAIO problem of not having the proper FN-key functions, with the exception for "Scroll Lock". I've been all over the interwebs and have found a bunch of "solutions". However, none of these work for my VGN-FE21M. I've tried installing relevant and irrelevant drivers, rebooting my computer about a dozen times now and the only thing I've succeeded in doing is make my once functioning "vol-buttons" display a striped volume control meter, which was not there before. This meter does nothing, when I press vol up or vol down it indicates that the volume is going down or up, but nothing happens. So not only can I not use an external monitor via the analog output, but I can no longer control my volume.

Some of my computer specs:

VGN-FE21M
Windows 7 32-bit

VAIO auto-update downloaded

All processes relevant to hotkeys are enabled

So I put my problem in the good hands of what I assume are competent Sony Wizards.
I hope that there is a solution to be had, or that in the models newer than mine own have this FN function implemented in BIOS.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Arbetsgivarn

[Blencogo]

Hi Arbetsgivarn and welcome.

This is a user forum, so no replies from Sony here.  I don't think you will get support from Sony anyway as they do not support Windows 7 on your model and do not provide Win 7 Sony Utilities for the FE-Series.

However, there is support for Vista 32-bit, so all you can do is to install the Utilities for Vista.  Go to the downloads page for your model here: -

http://www.sony.co.uk/support/en/product/VGN-FE21M/updates

Click on "Latest Downloads - Windows Vista"

Download and install the following IN THIS ORDER: -

1.  BIOS Update - R0174J3

2.  Sony Utils DLL - 7.0.00.11210

3.  Sony Shared Library - 3.0.00.10180

4.  Setting Utility Series - 2.0.00.11270

5.  Vaio Event Service - 3.0.00.13110

If this does not work, try repeating the installation.

There are no other compatible Utilities so if this does not work, all you can do is to reinstall in Vista compatibility mode.  Also, check in Device Manager to see if there are any driver errors that may be preventing everything working properly.  Have you installed Sony Notebook Control Driver?

Which graphics driver do you have installed?