Thursday, August 12, 2010

Sony Vaio Function (Brightness) Keys cause trouble with Windows 7

Recently, I have had to upgrade my Sony Vaio machine from Vista to Windows 7. Partly because Vista was awfully slow and had, of course, the infamous high crash rate. I bought my Vaio model in Europe (a VGN-SR4 series). I decided to perform a clean install for Windows 7, including the desired drivers for the model. After successful installation of the drivers, some of the function keys stopped working. Now, I wasn't able to change the brightness of my display with the use of the Fn + F5/F6 Keys. You can stop reading further if it doesn't bother you that much, but I found it highly irritable to always have to change the brightness through the display brightness settings. Additionally, imagine when you have to change the brightness that often (which I do). Damn, now how to solve the issue?

Sony Vaio Fn Key Win7, Brightness Fn Key not working with Win 7, Vaio Keys stop working and many others suggest varied order for utility/drivers installation to fix the issue. However, the concern here is that my Sony Vaio model (and I assume many other European models) doesn't have the Sony DLL Utils or the Notebook Utilities drivers. Bummer! Don't worry. You can still fix your Fn Key issue. In case yours is a European (or even any other) model and doesn't have the above mentioned drivers, carry out the following steps to solve the Vaio Fn Key problem in Windows 7:

(Note: It is always advisable to create a restore point after successful reboot and rollback to the desired state when you want to uninstall a driver. Many times, simply uninstalling the utility screws up the entire process and things may get awry)
  1. Follow the steps 1 - 4 according to Sony Fn Key and Win7.
  2. Install the following drivers/utilities in the exact same order as mentioned below:
    i)
    Vaio Event Service
    ii) Reboot
    iii) Setting Utility Series
    iv) Reboot
    v) Sony Shared Library
    vi) Reboot
    vii) Power Management
    viii) Reboot

2 comments:

  1. Happened to me too, I think you can fix it if you click on battery and select "energy saving"

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  2. This is great , but I do seem to have a bit of a problem with step 4, there is no driver named Power management?????
    Alternative, perhaps?

    I own a VGN-TZ150 netbook, and here are all the win7 drivers for the model(http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNTZ150NN&SelectOS=48#div_pos_66)

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