Switching from Ultimate to Business

[Guest]

I know this sounds like a step backwards, but does anyone know what the
easiest way is to switch from an install of Vista Ultimate to Vista Business.

I have a Vaio notebook that is labled "Vista Capable" on a sticker. I
upgraded from XP Pro to Vista Ultimate. For reasons Sony can't explain to
me, the Vista drivers available on their website will ONLY install on Vista
Business. They tell me I need to install Business on this machine if I want
the Sony drivers to work.

Thus I'm wondering if I have to do a complete reinstall of Vista with a
Business license, or if I can just enter a Business license key without doing
a full reinstall.

Thanks.

 

[JW]

What Sony is telling you sounds like total hogwash and makes no sense at all
since Ultimate is a superset of Business. The Sony rep may be getting
confused between drivers for 32bit and 64 bit Vista.

 

[Jane C]

Have you actually tried to install the Vista drivers from the Sony website?
As far as I know, a Vista driver should be a Vista driver, not dependent on
the edition of Vista. Perhaps Sony are unwilling to support Ultimate on
your particular model, but will support it for Business Edition.

The only way to go from Ultimate to Business would be a clean install. You
cannot 'downgrade' from one edition to a lesser one.

 

[Guest]

That's what I thought too. It makes no sense to me at all.

I've gotten the same answer from both their online chat representative and
from the telephone support representative.

All I know is that the built in web camera does not work and when I try to
install the driver from Sony's Vista driver website I get an error message
that it will only install under Windows Vista. When I point out this
apparent discrepancy to their tech support people the answer is basically "I
know it's odd, but that's the way Sony has it".

Needless to say it's very frustrating and right now I'm just trying to make
the best of a bad situation.

 

[Tony]

id try to get the driver working before taking that step, have you tried in
the device manager?
in the device manager, check to see if there is anything banged out, like
the camera, right click it, and hit reinstall driver if it's there, or goto
the driver tab, and hit update driver.
hit "browse..." then "let me pick..." then hit have disk, and point to the
location where the drivers are, and select it from the list.
now that depends on where the driver is, and if it's just an .exe file, if
it's an exe, try to extract it to the harddrive, and have the driver dialog
point there.
Drivers are drivers, unless it's an application based "driver" that access
the device (probably unlikely these days) then it should install no matter
what.
if you run into a problem installing, if you can, send a web link from
Sony's website here to the driver file in question, either I or someone else
may be able to help out more after having a look at the file/files in
question.
as the above can be a little tricky with some drivers.
good luck.

 

[Guest]

Here's the link to the camera driver. Other Sony drivers have given similar
errors, but this is the one that's frustrating me the most.

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VGNSZ140P&upd_id=2471&os_id=29

Thanks.

 

[Tony]

Ok, this is the driver that that download contains "Sony Image Convertion
Filter(Driver)" not sure if this is correct, but
extract the exe using uniextract
http://www.legroom.net/modules.php?...ource&file=index&page=software&app=uniextract
download and install it (using the installer might be easier then the rar)
http://uniextract.c1pher.com/uniextract15.exe
run uniextract, point to the file downloaded on your harddrive, use the
default method, it will extract the files into it's own folder where the exe
is located now, it will have the same name as the exe.
(in my test it was D:\Downloads\SODOTH-A1099808-US)
now, in the device manager, find the banged out device, and update driver
dialog exactly as I typed in my previous message, and make it point to
(path to original exe's folder)\SODOTH-A1099808-US\TEMPEXEFOLDER
(in my test that would be D:\Downloads\SODOTH-A1099808-US\TEMPEXEFOLDER)
and see if that works.

Something should work though, by the looks of it, it's just a question of
Sony tech support, they just don't want to support the device, it's not a
question of whether it will actually work or not.