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General discussion

64 bit drivers for Vista on a Sony Vaio?

May 4, 2009 2:27PM PDT

This is a slightly complicated issue and while I've made progress I figured I'd throw out a few nets and see what comes back too.

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-FW139E. It came stock with 32 bit Vista Home Premium. I upgraded to the 64 bit because when I bought it I knew I'd upgrade to 4 gigs of ram as soon as I could and I wanted full usability of this amount of ram. That being said apparently Sony doesn't like people tinkering with their products. There are NO 64 bit drivers available from Sony for my model, although through another forum I was recommended to download drivers from the FW170J model since it shipped with 64 bit installed. This helped a couple issues but the ones that remain are "Base System Device" has no driver. I've found out in research that supposedly this communicates with devices and programs that scan your hardware for information, not a biggy, but still. Then theres my wifi card driver, which has proved impossible to find. I have a Marvell gigabit card, and according to Sony the wifi card is a Marvell Atheros wifi adapter. Although no such device exists on Marvell's site, so I tried some more searching and tried famous Atheros' site as well. It appears I have the Atheros 928x model card. But even downloading 64 bit drivers for this I haven't been able to get it to install correctly. Not do or die, but extremely annoying as I'd like to take this laptop around sometime and be able to utilize the net when needed.

Then lastly the confusing webcam issue. Funny thing is that it came up automatically as already installed in the device manager but when trying to use software that would use this features (msn messenger, or even Sony's downloadable Arcsoft software) they would tell me that they couldn't connect to a webcam or that it wasn't installed. So its in the device manager but not working, you'd think an update driver would work but no. And there doesn't appear to be an available driver from sony for this device, only software to help it work, which is kind of pointless for me. So anyways, those are my two major issues, webcam and wifi, wifi over webcam but I would really like to be able to use the webcam features.

PS - I have also used a recommended program called uniextract to extract install files from Sony's packaged installs. Hasn't changed any end results though.

Discussion is locked

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Sony.
May 4, 2009 10:07PM PDT

The answer is clearly that Sony needs to supply these drivers. Any method involving driver extractors and more are going to be painful and time consuming plus you'll never be sure it will work.

While some can't stand the idea of running 32 bit Vista on a 4GB RAM machine I found it to not be worth all the pain. In fact, a few other issues has me restoring machines back to Vista 32.

Let's hope Windows 7 with it's new baked in VPC addresses all our concerns.
Bob

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webcam on 64bit
Jul 14, 2009 5:09PM PDT

You can get the webcam to work by downloading it from their website and using Universal Extractor on the executable. After you extract it there should be a file called something like DPInst64, run that and you'll be set. My guess is they are starting to include support for 64 bit stuff but not officially so that's why if you just run the executable it will give you the error about being for 32 bit (since the support for 64 bit is essentially hidden).

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This works for Windows 7 64-bit too!
Nov 21, 2009 2:28AM PST

That little tidbit about using Universal Extractor on the Vista drivers is BRILLIANT! It works! Best of all, the webcam drivers work for Windows 7 64-bit too. I had been searching in vain for 3 days before I stumbled on this advice.

What I want to know is WHY DOESN'T SONY TELL US that the 64-bit drivers exist instead of insisting that we are SOL?

Anyhow, thanks so much. You are King of the Lab.

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Using VAIO webcam with Vista 64
Aug 27, 2010 5:29AM PDT

I just tried this solution after searching for a solution since Sony could/would not help. IT WORKED!!! Thank you, Thank you. I talked to a knowledgeable SONY tech last night but she didn't appear to know about this.