loss of utilities and control centre

[gwilcock]

As a non-techy I would value advice about the apparent loss of the Sony Vaio Control Centre on my VGN-SZ1M. Also the S1 and S2 switches don't work, no matter how long I hold them down for. Also, I have lost the ability to Scroll up and down from the touch pad.

The manual says I can reset these via the control centre, but this has disappeared. I think it happened when our IT dept upgraded the laptop from XP home to XP professional.

Is it possible to find this on the CD that came with the laptop, and reload it without upsetting anything else that may have changed now the OS is XP Professional, or do I need to find an XP Professional control centre. I don't want to reload all the drivers as well, in case this upsets the machine (some drivers have been updated after purchase, but I don't know which)

Advice gratefully received.

Many thanks

Gordon Wilcock

[Blencogo]

Hi Gordon and welcome to Club Vaio.

It sounds like your IT Department has not reinstalled all the Sony Utilities which will have been lost when it was upgraded to XP Pro.

You can download the Original Utilities Package from here (next to bottom): -

http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/downloads/updates/updates.asp?site=voe_en_GB_cons&c=0&s=VGN-SZ&m=2158

The download is a .ZIP file. You need to right-click on the downloaded file and choose "Extract All". I would extract to a new folder called something like C:\Utilities.

In each Utilities Installer folder, you will find a 'Setup.exe'. Run this for each folder IN ORDER.

This will put back several utilities that run your Special Buttons, Your Fn Buttons for screen brightness and speaker volume, Vaio Control Centre etc. etc.

They should not interfere with your XP Pro installation.

[gwilcock]

Many thanks. That has been very helpful and I have re-installed the utilities download. Most grateful. BW Gordon