Sony Vaio Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT GPU windows 7 drivers

I have a Sony Vaio laptop and I recently upgraded from Vista Ultimate x86 to W7 Ultimate x86, and my Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT GPU is acting up. So I dug around for drivers, and I came up with this link: NVIDIA DRIVERS 197.16 WHQL

I am posting this here for anyone else who might be facing this problem, my model is the VGN-AR61ZU but this covers all models, and it basically says there are *no* W7 nvidia drivers for sony vaio yet. Go to supported models and scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see the following note:

->"The following notebooks are not supported in this release:

1. Notebooks supporting Hybrid Power with Intel chipsets.
2. Fujitsu notebooks – support will be added in a later release. Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) notebooks are supported in this release.
3. Sony VAIO notebooks – support will be added in a later release. Sony VAIO Windows 7 users can click here for driver update support.
4. Any notebook that is launched after the release date of this driver."

Clicking the here link directs you to the japanese sony vaio and that in turn directs you to the european (for me) club vaio page (the most useless in this case). None of those link to any actual W7 driver support.

Given that models are region based, I don't suppose there are drivers for european models from any other region, so unfortunately we must wait. I hope it's not very long.

I hope this helps, just wanted to inform people. Have fun all.

Octarin

Here you go: NVIDIA DRIVERS 257.21 WHQL they are the latest drivers.

Your the 3rd person this week who has thought 197 is the latest drivers.... what the hell is going on on Nvidias site?

shouldnt microsoft make a patch for that ? i mean off there os that is i don't have to download nvidia drivers when i had there card unless i wanted to use other features only they carried pretty much the current drivers each time

Solarstarshines said:

shouldnt microsoft make a patch for that ? i mean off there os that is i don't have to download nvidia drivers when i had there card unless i wanted to use other features only they carried pretty much the current drivers each time

Click to expand...

Im going to quote Digerati here, as he pretty much summed it up when I asked the same question last week:

Digerati said:

No. ALL graphics cards, motherboards, and monitors support basic VGA resolutions natively. If you think about it, they have to because (1) there is nothing that says they will be used with Windows - it could be Linux and (2) drivers are not loaded at boot until way past POST and well into the boot process - not until it determines, finds, and starts to read from the boot drive. And yet, you can watch on the monitor all kinds of stuff going on before the boot drive is touched.

There are 1000s of cards/IGPs out there. It is just not practical for the install disk to carry them all. So the industry has set on a minimum standard to get you going, then from there, you load specific drivers. Now what Windows often does is it reads from the card's own BIOS the card's information then it can go out and get specific drivers via Windows Update if you are connected to the Internet during install - but for security reasons, I don't recommend that.

Click to expand...

severedsolo said:

Here you go: NVIDIA DRIVERS 257.21 WHQL they are the latest drivers.

Your the 3rd person this week who has thought 197 is the latest drivers.... what the hell is going on on Nvidias site?

Click to expand...

good link severedsolo, could i just point out that the Sony notebooks are not supported by that release , you have to get the drivers from Sonys website

Or you can get them with a pre-modded INF,

Drivers | drivers for mobile cards and laptops | laptopvideo2go.com

that will work with just about any Nvidia laptop video card.

The main reason that the reference drivers won't work with the laptop cards (and the same applies to ATI), is that the laptop manufacturer's take them and mod the INF (and sometimes more than one) to work with the display and any power options that they have added. The reference drivers can and do work once the appropriate DevID has been added to the INF (hence the pre-modded ones above), but can run into display issues 9rare but can happen) and power saving issues.