Hello,

I just bought myself a shiny new Sony Vaio N11S and installed Vista
Ultimate. To my surprise *everything* seemed to have a driver and work
properly. Well, that was until i tried to adjust the screen brightness.
You can't. The keyboard controls don't work and there's no other way to
do it. Tried installing Sony Video Shared libraries 2.0. No error but
still no go. The upgrade to 3.0 won't work because it keeps saying that
i don't have 2.0 installed. I've installed everything off the vaio
support page but to no avail. The brightness controls are DEAD (weirdly
enough the volume control are working perfectly).

It breaks my heart to give up Vista with Aero just because the lazy
Sony engineers didn't make the buttons hardware calls.

Anyway is there like a piece of code somewhere that can access the ACPI
brightness settings? I've seen one for linux but maybe there is one for
windows too.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks


Adrian.

Adrian C. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just bought myself a shiny new Sony Vaio N11S and installed Vista
> Ultimate. To my surprise *everything* seemed to have a driver and work
> properly. Well, that was until i tried to adjust the screen brightness.
> You can't. The keyboard controls don't work and there's no other way to
> do it. Tried installing Sony Video Shared libraries 2.0. No error but
> still no go. The upgrade to 3.0 won't work because it keeps saying that
> i don't have 2.0 installed. I've installed everything off the vaio
> support page but to no avail. The brightness controls are DEAD (weirdly
> enough the volume control are working perfectly).
>
> It breaks my heart to give up Vista with Aero just because the lazy
> Sony engineers didn't make the buttons hardware calls.
>
> Anyway is there like a piece of code somewhere that can access the ACPI
> brightness settings? I've seen one for linux but maybe there is one for
> windows too.
>
> Any help is appreciated. Thanks
>
>
> Adrian.
>
You are not saying if this control worked with XP. If it did, do I need
to point a "piece of code", although it might not be a "piece of cake"
going back ... and waiting until the dust settles, this is no rush being
a guinea pig ...

Regards
--
John Doue

Adrian C. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just bought myself a shiny new Sony Vaio N11S and installed Vista
> Ultimate. To my surprise *everything* seemed to have a driver and work
> properly. Well, that was until i tried to adjust the screen brightness.
> You can't. The keyboard controls don't work and there's no other way to
> do it. Tried installing Sony Video Shared libraries 2.0. No error but
> still no go. The upgrade to 3.0 won't work because it keeps saying that
> i don't have 2.0 installed. I've installed everything off the vaio
> support page but to no avail. The brightness controls are DEAD (weirdly
> enough the volume control are working perfectly).
>
> It breaks my heart to give up Vista with Aero just because the lazy
> Sony engineers didn't make the buttons hardware calls.
>
> Anyway is there like a piece of code somewhere that can access the ACPI
> brightness settings? I've seen one for linux but maybe there is one for
> windows too.
>
> Any help is appreciated. Thanks
>
>
> Adrian.
>

The two application hkwnd.exe and hksrv.exe must be running at startup.
These come with the Sony Notebook Setup control, AIRC. What is the
model number on the keyboard or display?

Q

It's a VGN-N11S/W. I installed XP and found out that the app in charge
of catching the key events is VAIO Event Service, which is a windows
service. When you start this on XP it will catch the hotkeys. I also
installed it on Vista, it starts cleanly but does nothing. So i guess
the system calls are somehow different. I'm really really upset about
this because it's the only thing that's not working on vista. Hell, i
even managed to install some really old windows app and they're working
better than in XP.
So what's with this HotKey utility you guys are taking about. I can\t
find it anywhere on Sony's support site. Maybe this would work.. who
knows...

I FIXED IT !!!!!!!

Ok here's what you do, you copy the SonyNC folder to your root Vista
Partition (or just about anywhere) from the Preinstaled Drivers off the
Sony's support site. Go to Device Manager and click Update Driver on
that 'Unknown Device'. Choose 'go online and whatever', then it will
crawl your HDD for drivers and it will install Sony Notebook Control
Device.
Then install VAIO Event Handler. Reboot and VOILA !

Adrian C. wrote:
> I FIXED IT !!!!!!!
>
> Ok here's what you do, you copy the SonyNC folder to your root Vista
> Partition (or just about anywhere) from the Preinstaled Drivers off the
> Sony's support site. Go to Device Manager and click Update Driver on
> that 'Unknown Device'. Choose 'go online and whatever', then it will
> crawl your HDD for drivers and it will install Sony Notebook Control
> Device.
> Then install VAIO Event Handler. Reboot and VOILA !
>

Congratulations! So this series does not use the hdwnd and hksrv
applications? Sony has changed with the times, I suppose. The reason
that I asked about the labeled model number is that on the US site there
is no N11S series notebook.

Q

Quaoar wrote:
> Adrian C. wrote:
> > I FIXED IT !!!!!!!
> >
> > Ok here's what you do, you copy the SonyNC folder to your root Vista
> > Partition (or just about anywhere) from the Preinstaled Drivers off the
> > Sony's support site. Go to Device Manager and click Update Driver on
> > that 'Unknown Device'. Choose 'go online and whatever', then it will
> > crawl your HDD for drivers and it will install Sony Notebook Control
> > Device.
> > Then install VAIO Event Handler. Reboot and VOILA !
> >
>
> Congratulations! So this series does not use the hdwnd and hksrv
> applications? Sony has changed with the times, I suppose. The reason
> that I asked about the labeled model number is that on the US site there
> is no N11S series notebook.
>
> Q

Nope, you don't need that. Just the Sony NC and the VAIO Event Service.
I hope this one gets indexed pretty good cause i have a hunch many
people will stumble over this Vista-on-Vaio thingy.