Sony Vaio VGN-AW31ZJ/B NVIDIA Driver Woes

One of the most frustrating practices of computer manufacturers is forcing you to scrap a perfectly capable PC by not providing updated drivers for the latest operating systems.  Case in point: SONY and their awful practice of not supporting their VAIO product line.  I am the not-so-proud owner of two SONY models:  VGN-SZ5XN/C (Service Tag J002KG77) and  VGN-AW31ZJ/B (Service Tag C601LH9H).  The first came with a hybrid Intel/NVidia GeForce GO7400 card configuration, whereas the second carries a NVidia GeForce 9600M GT.

Both of those were pretty expensive when I bought them.  They came with Windows Vista drivers, an OS that was abandoned a couple of months after their purchase.  SONY eventually provided drivers for Windows 7 for the second model, but after that they seemed to forget all about them.

Today I spent a few hours trying to install Windows 10 on the the AW model.  The installation was flawless and the laptop seemed to be perfectly capable of running the 64-bit OS, although there was a caveat:  It couldn't recognise the GPU, and only gave me an extremely low resolution by using the Microsoft Display Adapter.

For those of you who are dealing with the same thing, here is the procedure I followed:

Download this file and extract it somewhere on your hard drive (for example C:\Temp).

Run EP0000228472.exe.

This is the driver for SONY firmware extension parser.

After that, just to be sure, reboot your PC.

Go to device manager, expand Display Adapters, right click on Microsoft Display Adapter, click on Properties, click on Driver tab, click on Update Driver button and point it to the folder you extracted the files (C:\Temp in our case).

In a couple of seconds, your screen should flicker and you will have NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT installed properly.  If you get an application crash, pay no attention to it, it's just the NVIDIA control panel and it only happens once.

For the SZ5XN/C you will need this file.  Again, extract it on your hard drive, install the Sony Firmware Extension Parser device first and reboot.  Make sure the switch on your laptop is set to SPEED.  Update the Microsoft Display Adapter driver by pointing to the folder you extracted the files.

Finally, here is the driver for SONY's card reader.

Hope this helped.  If you need any assistance, feel free to comment.