Finally, got back the brightness control in windows 7 on my Vaio CS17

Had a tough time trying to get the brightness control to work after installing windows 7 on my Vaio CS17G, which came with vista originally installed.Every time i pressed the Fn+F5 or Fn+F6 the display bar moved by one block, but there was no change in the brightness. Windows mobility centre didn’t have the brightness option.

Finally got hold of the correct driver upgrade version from the Sony Australia, which did the job. 
Windows 7 Upgrade NVIDIA Graphics Driver Upgrade Version 8.15.11.8640
This program will upgrade NVIDIA Graphics Driver to version 8.15.11.8640.
Although it says that this is applicable only to VGN-CS36GJ, VGN-CS38GD, VGN-CS36TJ, VGN-CS36MJ, VGN-CS37GH, VGN-CS28GD, VGN-CS36SJ, VGN-CS27GJ: it worked without a hitch for me on my Vaio CS17G.

Now i have brightness changing with Fn keys and also on power on/off and i have brightness control from windows mobility centre as well.

Download the driver from here.

Ubuntu lucid lynx 10.4 on Vaio CS17G

Its nearly a week since the release of ubuntu lucid lynx or ubuntu 10.4. I upgraded when it was still beta and now i have fully updated lynx. On my vaio cs17g, i was hoping it will fix few specific glitches with this laptop. see my previous blog for this.
So does anything change? Not really
Although there are a lot of improvements over ubuntu 9.10 like,

• Faster boot time: some guys claim to have a boot time of less than 10 secs, i get around 15 secs till Login screen.
• Improved appearances: in the sense, better default themes, i like dust sand, ambience
• Introduction of "me menu" which i feel is a very nice idea.

In terms of addressing my specific problems pertaining to this laptop, no much change.

• suspend does not work: it suspends well but no keyboard on wake up
• Inbuilt microphone does not work
• Media keys do not work

I managed to get the brightness key working after tweaking and getting them to work with nvclock.

Apart from these glitches i feel it is a great improvement over the previous release.