Sony VAIO Audio Driver

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-FS640/W that was just reformatted to Win XP SP2. Everything seems to be working fine except the audio. First off, The headphone jack was just replaced, but because both the headphones and speakers are not working, I'm looking at drivers as the potential problem. I currently have the Realtek High Def Audio driver installed, which is what the Sony website provides. I heard something about a UAA Audio Bus Fix though. Any thoughts?

 

Greetings, jools1976.

Yeah, the UAA patch might do the trick. Try this:

1. Uninstall the Realtek driver - you might consider running Driver Sweeper to make sure it's cleaned out.
2. Install the UAA patch located here or here.
3. Reboot, then reinstall the Realtek driver.

 

Chipset driver was installed prior to the audio driver. Everything looks good in the device manager, nothing yellow. I tried the UAA patch, but I had just finished running windows update, which installed SP3, so it said it wasn't necessary. I also tried installing another driver I found online by googling the PCI/VEN number, still nothing.

 

You might have to do the SP2/SP3 fakeout:

1. Click Start > Run, type regedit, then click OK.
2. Expand (click the plus signs in front of) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, System, Current Control Set, Control, Windows.
3. In the right panel, right-click CSDVersion and choose Modify.
4. In the highlighted input window, you should see 300. Change it to 200.
5. Click OK, close the Registry Editor and restart your PC.

XP will now think it's at Service Pack 2. Reinstall the MS UAA patch, and then reinstall the audio drivers.

Make sure to reboot and then test your sound before changing the value back to 300.

Then follow the same steps to change it back to SP3 (change the CSDVersion from 200 back to 300).

 

Followed the procedure, and the fix installed. Still no audio though.

 

And, a couple of quick silly questions: the manual for that model shows a button marked as 'S1' (should be the first left button in the row of buttons above the Function keys). The 'S1' button toggles the audio on/off - have you tried that?

Also, the 'Fn' + 'F2' combination turns on and off the built-in speakers and the headphones, and the 'Fn' + 'F3/F4' adjusts the built-in speaker volume - have you tried those?

Not trying to be facetious, but I had to ask.

 

Ok here's the latests scoop. Just to see, I plugged in a set of external speakers, which are now working (wasn't before). Checked, and the Windows Audio Service is running and set to automatic. The S1 button seems to have no effect. Oddly enough, when I hit Fn+F2 (or S1) it does not disable the audio. Here's something else, with the speakers plugged in, my POST screen makes a chiming sound on startup, so I'm thinking that this may be a BIOS issue as the sound comes pre-Windows boot. But, as luck would have it, my bios is password protected and I don't know the password. Tried pulling the CMOS battery and also tried Phoenix backdoor passwords. No luck.

 

Hello,
Here is some info about Sony VAIO BIOS passwords. Maybe it will help. Good Luck.

 

Thanks for the info. I'm having a hard time getting this to roll though. It says to DL HWiNFO (DOS Version) and copy the program GETSMBUS.EXE to a floppy. I'm not seeing this program. It also says to boot to a DOS-based OS like ME or 98... will the recovery console in XP do the trick? Thanks again!

 

Hello,
The recovery console will not work. It says that you have to have a FAT32 partition in order to run the program on the PC, which I would not recommend. GETSMBUS.EXE probably needs to be extracted from the exe file but I found it here. The problem is that you will probably need to create a bootable DOS flash drive in order to run the program and then save it because if your hard drive is formatted NTFS, the dos program will not see the hard drive or be able to save the log file to it. If you had a formatted FAT32 partition on your hard drive, you could boot from a DOS CD, run the program and then save the log file to the partition. The UBCD may be another option. It has FREEDOS and USB support. If you were able to add the GETSMBUS.EXE to a USB drive formatted with FAT32, you could run it from the flash drive after booting from UBCD. I may be able to find a bootable iso with USB support. You could then boot that and then run the program.

 

Here is a bootable DOS CD with USB support. Format the the USB key with FAT32 and the GETSMBUS.EXE copied to it. Plug it in before you boot the CD.

 

Thanks for the info! I ended up using a USB floppy drive to create an MS-DOS Startup Disk, then copied GETSMBUS.EXE to the disk. It starts and runs fine, but I'm getting the message SMBus Host Controller Not Found (Or something very close to that) when I run it. Any thoughts?

 

Not sure. Maybe somebody on the board can give some thoughts on it.

 

I posted this awhile ago. It may help. I cannot confirm if this will work. Found it on the web. Do not try this more than 3 times. Some machines lock you out after 3 attempts.

 

Worked perfectly! Thanks a million bro! Now back to my audio issue. Reset the default BIOS values... but still no audio. I think I'm going to have to get it apart again and trace the audio wiring. Maybe an issue with the harness.

 

Wow,
So that Master Password Matrix actually works. :-D

 

Like a charm. So I put a small voltage (AAA Battery) across each speaker right from the mobo connector and got crackeling at each speaker. So the speakers and wiring is good. BIOS is set to defult values... Mobo problem?

 

What happens when you run the DirectX diagnostics? "DxDiag"

 

At the sound tab I tested, it asked me if I heard any sounds, I clicked 'no'. It gave me this error:

DirectSound test results: Failure at step 19 (User verification of software): HRESULT = 0x00000000 (error code)

 

Try the steps here.

Where did my Sounds go?

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/top10faqs2.htm

 

Just a though but you might want to update to SP3.

 

All my updates are up to snuff... When I started the thread I was on SP2 but have since updated...

 

Just finished going through the troubleshooting steps from that link. Still no joy. You think maybe I've got a bum driver?

 

That's possible. Under the sound device in device manager, what is the vendor and device ID?

 

With the driver I already have installed I get:

HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0260&SUBSYS_104D0000&REV_1003\4&44996B3&0&0001

Should I uninstall and see if it stays the same?

 

Uninstall the drive you have now in add/remove programs. Then use Drive Sweeper to clean out what is left of the sound driver. Install this driver. From what I have read on PCI Database, your Vendor ID is kind of unusual. Other people with this hardware ID has had success with this driver. I would link to the one on MajorGeeks but this is supposed to have a FIX. Not sure what though. This is not the latest driver but see if it works for you.

If this does not work for you, try the Microsoft FIXIT for sound

http://support.microsoft.com/fixit/

 

Thanks again dude. But, no luck. Check this post out:

http://opennomad.com/content/flashing-vaio

I installed the Sony Shared Library for Microsoft as there is apparently an issue with installing an OEM copy of XP onto a Vaio. Reinstalled my drivers after I ran it. No result though. Anyway... thought it might raise some new ideas.

 

I am going to throw one last thing out. On the esupport site are two downloads.

Notebook Control and Utilities - 2 file(s)

Sony Notebook Utilities
Sony Notebook Control Device Driver

They may provide additional control over things like sound.

You may also want to download the last file in "System Components" if the computer was originally installed with Vista.

 

Well, I've installed just about every driver on the Sony site for this model. Doesn't want to cooperate. Guess it's just one of those things...

 

I said I would throw out one last thing but maybe it is a matter of just listing the device in the sound dialog box. But, I am probably wrong.

 

Yeah that stuff's all good. I was reading that sometimes with Sony machines you have to use an actual Sony Recovery disc or you will run into issues. Maybe I'll get in touch with Sony and see if I can get my hands on one.

 

Good idea.

Crazy thought: while you wait for the disk, one thing you might try is burning and booting to a live Linux distro, see if you get audio. I keep thinking this might have something to do with the original hardware repair you performed - the Linux might help verify, one way or another.