The Long Road to 1080p with Vista on Sony Vaio AR Laptop

Please excuse the following post, I'm going on a rant here….

You buy a laptop with HD bluray drive and a HDMI port, then buy a HDTV with HDMI but can you get them to work ? Oh dear god no, not if you are running Vista. I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista and that's when the problems started. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't go back to XP but the time I have wasted on this has been huge.

When I got my AR 21s laptop it has windows XP on it, everything worked, proper drivers, cool. This was the best laptop that Sony sell on October 2006, and the newer Sony AR series are still the best equipped today, you'd think they would provide A grade support. So they provide 1 set of Vista drivers after Vista ship which only partially work, a nice 1^st step, but after they have released a few newer models in the AR series the driver support stops for the older models. Its like they stopped testing driver releases from their equipment manufacturers like NVIDIA etc.

For example the latest graphics drivers for Vista don't support 1080p HD output through the HDMI port. I was about to repartition and reinstall XP to get this back so I could enjoy the bluray discs I bought when a random search brought back this Club VAIO community article.

It tells of how to install NVidia 158.43 beta drivers but it seems NVIDIA has forgotten about this 7600 GT graphics card so you have to edit the nv_disp.inf file to put in your own hardware IDs to get the drivers to install. The article kindly supplies the necessary file edited for you. This was great and after 4 reboots I have 1080p on my HDTV. Only problem is that whenever I launch the WinDVD BluRay player I get a blue screen of death (BSOD) in the nv4_mini.sys file.

Well I got it working finally, there is a newer beta driver called 158.45 which I could not find on the NVIDIA site. I got them from SoftPedia. I had to figure out what the edits were (using WinDiff) and insert the lines myself in 2 places (shown in bold)

[NVIDIA.Mfg.NTx86.6.0]

%NVIDIA_G80.DEV_0191.1% = nv_NV3x, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0191

%NVIDIA_G80.DEV_0193.1% = nv_NV3x, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0193

%NVIDIA_G80.DEV_0194.1% = nv_NV3x, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0194

%NVIDIA_G73.DEV_0399.1% = nv_NV3x, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0399

%NVIDIA_G84.DEV_0400.1% = nv_NV3x, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0400

%NVIDIA_G84.DEV_0402.1% = nv_NV3x, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0402

And

; Localizable Strings

NVIDIA = "NVIDIA"

NVIDIA_G80.DEV_0191.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX"

NVIDIA_G80.DEV_0193.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS"

NVIDIA_G80.DEV_0194.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra"

NVIDIA_G73.DEV_0399.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 GT"

NVIDIA_G84.DEV_0400.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS"

NVIDIA_G84.DEV_0402.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT"

NVIDIA_G86.DEV_0421.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT"

NVIDIA_G86.DEV_0422.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS"

NVIDIA_G86.DEV_0423.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8300 GS"

This is to tell the NVIDIA setup program that the 7600 GT hardware applies to this installation. If anyone wants the edited nv_disp.inf file please let me know.

Now I finally have 1080p appearing on my HDTV, it looks cool. I played Casino Royale movie on it briefly. However I can't hear it because the sound does not go through the HDMI cable (even though its supposed to support it) and I can't use the remote control because Vista recognises the Infrared port but doesn't seem to accept any signs in media centre or WinDVD. Its getting ridiculous at this stage.