Anyway, I'm no computer tech, but you're basically saying that there is no windows 7 driver for the 8400m gt, only vista?
Kinda. It seems like NVIDIA is trying to pull the plug for that card to force users to upgrade, and the driver installers won't recognize it (this happens all the time for other oldish cards that are still theoretically supported). Or is somehow modded by Sony and the device ID does not match with the ones in the driver settings.
What I know is that there are a lot of others with a laptop with that card (especially VAIO) that had similar issues when upgrading to 7, and not all managed to solve them.
From a purely technical standpoint, a Vista driver should work fine in 7 too and let you access the card's video decoding co-processors. Which I assume is why the DVD maker is making such a fuss.
Since the above is a hack of the device ID list in the driver configuration file, it should theoretically work with all devices that the driver itself claims to support.
Or at least it was like that back in the day when they dropped support of AGP cards. Edit the config file and the driver will load and work fine.
Does this mean I can't watch blue rays on it anymore.
As said above, the card was helping in decoding videos. I have no way to know if the processor alone can do it. Try playing blu-rays with VLC or a trial of whatever player can do it, and look at the processor's load in Task manager. If the video is fine and the processor load isn't huge, you could be ok even without driver.
It used to have windvd preinstalled.
It's usually recommended to find the activation key of your OEM-installed programs before a reinstall. Although it's not always possible as it relies on gray-area programs that look around the registry or inside encrypted files in the program itself.
Unless you can convince the Sony support guys that you had it preinstalled when you bought the laptop, it's gone.
There are free alternatives like
Potplayer (fourth from the top) or
VLC, but it's not a given that they will work on your disks.
The other alternative is
ripping the disks. That is copying the video on your hard drive in a format that most serious players like VLC will play without issues, without harming the disks. Which is going to fill any HDD very fast unless you tone down the quality a bit, as it's 12+ GB of movie file per blu-ray.
People into these things usually buy a multi-TB external storage drive.
For me, it's whether I want to revert back or stay with win7 and not have my graphics card recognised.
There is also the Linux option. You can try out
Linux Mint Cinnamon 15 or
Ubuntu 13.04 (the former having windows-XP-like interface, the latter is a bit weirder ala windows 8 but you might like it more) from a USB drive (download the Iso file and then you can use
rufus to make it, when booting from the USB drive, choose "try it" or something like that, not "install") and see if they work fine (they usually do and everything works out of the box) and you can play your disks with VLC as explained
here.
They also come preloaded with Firefox and LibreOffice and various other useful programs (and you can download more from the store, ala Android). All free of charge (only a select few apps require a payment, the bulk is free), and most stuff is kept updated.
The only weak point of linux is that it can't run most Windows games. Although Steam did open up shop in Ubuntu/Mint too with a cadre of indie and less-known ported games (don't expect any major title), more might come in the future.
Above is part of the thread you provided. Could you make this sound easier for me, if you know what it mean?
Ok, downloading the thing now (can't give better directions without looking at the file). When I have it in my hands I'll try to explain better if I can.
