Built-in camera doesn't work on Sony Vaio notebook VGN-FE790 after clean install

Posted by jonathanztaub@yahoo.com on November 19, 2006, 2:51 pm

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I bought a Sony Vaio notebook model VGN-FE790.
It came with lots of junk so naturally I formatted the hard drive and
installed a clean version of Microsoft XP Professional. I downloaded
all the drivers from Sony's web site.
However, I'm unable to install the camera driver. It doesn't recognize
the the drivers.
Sony support was not really helpful and stated some of the hardware may
not work under a clean installation.

I'm sure other people have come across this issue.
If you were able to solve it, please let me know (and don't spare on
the details :-) ).

thanks.

Posted by BillW50 on November 19, 2006, 4:41 pm

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Should be a piece of cake. Restore with all of the crap back on it and
look under the Device Manager for the camera, look under the properties
and grab all of the drivers. Although finding the inf file will take
some searching. Or search under the registry and make your own inf file.

--
Bill

Posted by jonathanztaub@yahoo.com on November 19, 2006, 9:13 pm

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Thanks.

I also did further research and there appears to be a stream.sys file
which may be related to the problem.
As I did this and the step you advised (while rebooting
uninstalling/installing) it finally works.
I don't know what exactly fixed it and don't intend to find out. ;-)
Who knows if it'll work again.

thanks very much for your suggestion.
It appears that whatever you download from Sony's web site is not
identical to whatever is on the restore CDs.
Bad software quality control in my opinion.

Finally got it to work.

:-)

Posted by GlowingBlueMist on November 20, 2006, 11:51 am

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Now that you have a working system to your liking burn a clone or copy of it
onto CD's or an external drive so you won't have to go through the entire
process next time.

External USB drives are good for this if your motherboard BIOS supports
booting from an external USB source. Always good to try booting from the
backup after first making one just to be sure everything got transferred.

Posted by Quaoar on November 20, 2006, 2:35 pm

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jonathanztaub@yahoo.com wrote:
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"Clean install" on Vaio noteooks is the kiss of death unless one
researches the proprietary Sony applications and libraries that are
required for complete hardware functionality, as you have discovered
with the camera installation. These used to be available for individual
installation from the recovery disk set on most, but not all, models.

Q