April 21st, 2008

Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time

Posted by Ed Bott @ 8:03 pm

Categories: Hardware, Windows Vista

Tags: Sony Corp., Sony Vaio, Clean Install, Installation, Driver, Microsoft Windows Vista, Machine, Recovery Partition, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn)

For a clean install or a cleanup, drivers are key. That’s never been so true as now. A PC that was built a year ago is likely to have have been plagued with buggy drivers for video hardware, network adapters, and other crucial system components. Today, driver quality for Vista components across the board is noticeably better (although pockets of bugginess still exist). For a clean install, my challenge was to find the best driver for each system component, a strategy that required three separate search parties.

Phase 1, of course, was the assortment of drivers included as part of the default Windows installation and delivered as signed Optional updates through Windows Update. On Jeremy’s Vaio, the default install left only a small number of unsupported devices.

A clean install also exposed the strengths and weaknesses of Vista’s built-in troubleshooting tool, the Problem Reports and Solutions application. After completing a clean install, a full pass through the Important, Recommended, and Optional sections of Windows Update turned up a few additional drivers, including an update from Intel for the Wireless-N adapter.

Next stop was the Sony support website, which is a model of clarity and organization. Before selecting drivers, utilities, and other updates, I installed Sony’s Download Taxi program, a sharp little download helper that made the process easier than it otherwise might have been. I downloaded and installed all the drivers and utilities from the Original group (ignoring several compatibility warnings that turned out to be bogus) and then installed the relevant downloads from the Updates group. The installation went smoothly, with one noteworthy exception: installing the Sony Notebook Utilities seemed to go for an inordinately long time with no feedback, and I’m glad I didn’t get impatient and kill the process before it completed.

After all that, a pop-up balloon in the system tray told me that Vista had some solutions for problems that had been reported during installation. The five solutions it recommended were all signed drivers, three of which had not been delivered through Windows Update. By following the links, I found updated drivers for the UPEK’s TouchChip fingerprint reader, the Toshiba Bluetooth stack, the Texas Instruments FlashMedia reader, and some Sony components.

Those drivers made it possible to enable all the hardware that had been languishing in the Unknown Devices category in Device Manager and also enabled several components (such as the built-in webcam), but it still wasn’t good enough to get this system to peak performance. For that, I had to actively search for the best possible drivers. That was a particular challenge with the woefully outdated video drivers for the Nvidia Go 7400. Getting better performance required a trip to the forums at Notebook Review, downloading the Universal Extractor utility, and then a bit of tweaking to Sony’s Nvidia drivers for a different model. The installation was successful, but it’s certainly not a job for amateurs.

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