Upgrading Sony Vaio laptop from Vista to Windows 7 issue

[Kenneth John]

I want to upgrade my wife's 2 yr. old Sony Vaio laptop, model VGN-AR520E from Vista 32 bit to Windows 7 32 bit. I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor on her laptop and one campatibility issue showed up. That is the driver for her NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT display adapter is not compatible with Windows 7.
I checked to see if Sony has an updated driver for her model and they don't. I tried to update the driver using the device manager and it told me that she is using the latest driver.
I found that NVIDIA had an updated driver for the GeForce 8400M GT that is compatible for both Vista and Windows 7 so I downloaded the installation package and tried to run it on her laptop. I get a message saying that the NVIDIA driver is for either Vista 32 bit or Windows 7 32 bit OS and the NVIDIA setup / install app could not find this OS on her laptop. This is not true as she IS running Vista 32 bit Service Pack 2.
Is this NVIDIA GeForce driver compatibility issue a show stopper for my upgrade to Windows 7? Should I just run the Windows 7 upgrade and see what happens? I don't want to have to reinstall all of her programs and data files, if I don't have to.
Thanks for any advice you can offer!

[trulad]

I would go ahead and install Win.7 then download and install the driver. I think if you download it now it will be wiped out when win 7 installs.
trulad

[Kenneth John]

Thanks for the suggestion. My concern is that Sony doesn't offer a more recent driver, one that is compatible with Windows 7, so I would no choice but to use the most recent driver from NVIDIA's web site. When I tried to run the NVIDIA driver update app on the laptop under Vista I got an error message saying I didn't have either Vista 32 bit or Windows 7 32 bit OS, which is not true. I sure hope that I don't run into this error message when I run it again under Windows 7!

[trulad]

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/model-home.pl?

go to Sony support and look there for drivers.
trulad

[Kenneth John]

A little more research and this is what I found out:
1) The NVIDIA drivers for the GeForce 8400M GT video card do NOT work with Sony Vaio laptops as stated in their download page. You must get the latest drivers from Sony.
2) Sony, at this time, doe not have a Windows 7 driver available. This means upgrading to Windows 7 is not possible.

This is the first and last Sony Vaio laptop that will be purchased in our household.

[rjfvillarosa]

Originally Posted by Kenneth John

I don't want to have to reinstall all of her programs and data files, if I don't have to.
Thanks for any advice you can offer!

If you are doing a fresh install and not an upgrade you will have to save her files and reinstall any third party software she is using.
With harddrives being as cheap as they are right now why not buy another harddrive and do a fresh install of W7 on it? You will be surprised at how adaptable W7 is and how it manages with hardware that there are no compatible drivers for. If it doesn't work out you can always buy a cheap enclosure and use the harddrive for external storage.
I am running W7 on an old Comcrap machine that I use as a test rig. The Comcrap originally came with an AMD Sempron 3100, 512mb of ram and onboard graphics. W7 is running great on that old AMD, the onboard graphics and 2gigs of ram.

[Kenneth John]

Thanks for the previous reply. I know what you mean about hard drives being so cheap but this being a laptop I don't think I want to get into replacing the hard drive. Since my wife has expressed a desire to get rid of the Sony bloatware that came with the laptop, I have given some thought to using the "custom" upgrade option that would wipe her hard drive clean and we'd start with a clean slate.
Before doing this, I have to be 100% certain that I can revert back to her current Vista OS if something doesn't work with her Windows 7 upgrade, in particular with the graphics driver. She doesn't have a copy of Vista, just the restore CD that came with the laptop. What are my other choices for restoring to her Vista environment instead of using the restore CD from Sony?

[dbrueck]

John,

I had same issue with VAIO VGN-AR620E....I successfully installed Windows 7....here's how I did it in three steps:

1) download NVIDIA modded driver 186.91 from laptopvideo2go.com Forum section (read site's Getting Started and FAQ if you're unfamiliar with this site) while still in Vista and save to another partition/drive that will not be overwritten by Windows 7 install.

2) Custom install Windows 7 (cannot use Upgrade method)....which will pick standard VGA driver, which is fine.

3) After install is complete, update the video driver by "have disk" method....point to the 186.91 modded inf file.....it will install without complaint...I've had no issues since I used this process over a week ago.

Good luck!
Dave

[wmabrad]

I had the same problem. This fixed it 100%.


Go to this link:

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/top...a-32bit-clevo/


click 'Download Drivers" (in red). Save it to your desktop, double click the icon. Then it extracts. Once it has extracted, go back to that site and click "INF modified". Download that to your desktop and then drag it into the folder. It will ask you if you want to replace/over-write existing file, say yes.

Then run the setup.exe inside the folder, let it install and you're all set.