NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 with Windows 8 on an old Sony Vaio

Published

October 01, 2013

Words

385

Reading time

1 minutes

The man drawer. We’ve all got one. Full of wires, gadgets and old tech that you just can’t bring yourself to throw out in the case you need it. Mine hadn’t been sorted for a good couple of years so as part of my recent move from London to Manchester, I sorted it out. Amongst the obscure connectors, chargers and wires I dug out my old Sony Vaio VGN-SZ4XWN.

This was a lovely laptop back in the day and had a pretty decent spec but was a bit pricy at £1699 inc. VAT) accoridng to this TechRadar review: http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-and-netbooks/sony-vaio-vgn-sz4xwn-c-23653/review.

Anyway, I wanted to give it a new lease of life for giving to my parents-in -law to replace their dying old-school PC. It came with Vista, so the obvious thing to do seemed to be to ditch Vista and install Windows 8. Considering that at the time, Microsoft were doing a £24.99 upgrade offer.

Now it’s all working fine, it flies! But I did have some problems with the graphics card driver because it wasn’t supported on Windows 8 and at the time, Nvidia hadn’t released a new driver. So here are some notes that might help someone with the same problem:

I found a comment on an old Posterous blog that doesn’t seem to exist anymore, but it said

If you’re looking for drivers that work with windows 8, try these, the 64 bit one worked perfectly on my Sony Vaio VGN SZ433N:

“Found the latest driver buried on a Microsoft Update site that is fully WHQL certified that is newer and seems to work perfectly.

Version Information
259.47 (Aug 21, 2010)
8.17.12.5947

Download Links
32 bit:http://download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/driver/drvs/2010/08/20376...
64 Bit:http://download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/driver/drvs/2010/08/20376...

Use 7 zip (or similar) to extract the cab to a folder.
Then go to device manager
Expand Display adaptors
Right click on the sub entry and update driver
Manually select the folder you extracted the cab to
Done!"

This worked for me.

There might also be some more info on the following forums:

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Geforce Desktop/Notebook Driver Information Updated 3/8/2012 - GeForce…
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Windows 8 preview says thet driver is not compatible - GeForce Forums
_Edit description_forums.geforce.com