Audio drivers for downgrading to xp on AR51M

[evilenglishman]

Hi
today I got my new laptop and my first job is to get XP on it.
I have managed to get practically everything working in XP except for the audio. I've been looking all over to try and sort this out but no matter what I try I cant get it working.

Ive tried the vista drivers and drivers from various places.

I currently have 2 problems.

1. Pop up on windows start:

Rthdcpl - EAccessViolation

2. SigmaTel High Definition Audio CODEC - yellow ! in device manager with error 10 - device cant start.

Can anyone point me to some drivers that will work?

[DarthRicmu]

Maybe u guys could help me with my audio problem on the AR41-l.

I followed your steps but my audio will not work and the driver from the audio.rar will not install saying that itb is not the one for this computer. All of them say that though I can see my Sigmatel device in the device manager (with a yellow ! next to it)

[paul_123]

Hello All,

I have just removed vista from my AR51M laptop, and installed xp. I have managed to install the graphics card driver after much difficulty, but can't get anything else to work including the ethernet card, wireless card etc. I have been through the forum and I am kind of confused as lot of things are repeated with some differences. Will somebody be able to tell me what I need to do to get everything working.

Cheers.
Paul.

[DarthRicmu]

@paul_123

The other drivers from the Vista part of your laptop should work (almost all) just follow the steps provided on page 2-3 of this thread.

------------------

So anybody that can tell me what I should do after I installed the kb high definition audio driver (the 11 variant - latest)?

I'm getting a (!) next to my "sigmatel high definition audio codec" in the device managager

and

a (!) next to my unidentified "audio device on High definition audio bus"

[sy2j]

Firstly, I want to say thanks to everyone who's contributed to this subject. Your help has been vital in getting me to this stage with my AR51M XP downgrade. (If only they'd given us XP to start with.)

I think I'm nearly there, my biggest problem now is the Ethernet Controller. I can't get this working. I've tried the driver in the AR5_Drivers pack, but it doesn't like it.

The other things in Device Manager are:
- BCM2046 Bluetooth Device
- SM Bus Controller

I'd be very grateful to anyone who could reply with how they got their ethernet controller working. (Am I right in thinking it's this which is stopping me from connecting to my wireless broadband?)

Does it matter which order I installed utils/drivers earlier in the process?

Many thanks in advance, and thanks again to the likes of nipper99, your time and advice have kept me sane to this point!

Sy

[synthman]

Hi all

I've replied once but it got deleted for some reason???

Firstly, I want to say thanks to everyone who's contributed to this subject. Your help has been vital in getting me to this stage with my AR51M XP downgrade. (If only they'd given us XP to start with.)

I'll second that, great job.

I think I'm nearly there, my biggest problem now is the Ethernet Controller. I can't get this working. I've tried the driver in the AR5_Drivers pack, but it doesn't like it.

The other things in Device Manager are:
- BCM2046 Bluetooth Device
- SM Bus Controller

ethernet driver
http://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=103&pId=3

WiFi
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=2753

bluetooth
http://www.broadcom.com/products/bluetooth_update.php

Storage driver for GM965 express.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2101&OSFullName=Windows*+...

I'd be very grateful to anyone who could reply with how they got their ethernet controller working. (Am I right in thinking it's this which is stopping me from connecting to my wireless broadband?)

You may need the cable connection to set up your router.

Does it matter which order I installed utils/drivers earlier in the process?

Storage drivers first. (but it does not seem to matter)

Many thanks in advance, and thanks again to the likes of nipper99, your time and advice have kept me sane to this point!

Sy

It is not over yet!

[synthman]

Hi

Just typed an essay with questions and solutions clicked submit and it had logged me out so I lost it

In a nutshell...
Has anyone got the optical out to work?
Does anyone get the runtime error when running the Vaio control?
Anyone had th camera working with the AR21 controls then lost it?
With nLite you don't need to downlad the SATA files just get the 5MB download for the GM965 chipset then use the command iata78_enu.exe -a -p where the is where you want the files to go.

Come on Sony give us some support for XP :smileygrin:

[sy2j]

Many thanks synthman for your reply to my earlier post, this was very helpful in ascertaining that I was using the correct drivers for both ethernet and wifi.

However, I didn't get very far with the other two. The 965 storage driver installed ok and I have the storage manager console is working fine.

The bluetooth driver looks good, although when I try to install the bluetooth utility, the process hangs and then asks me to connect the bluetooth device? So this is my problem there.

I still have the 'SM Bus Controller' in Device Manager, though. Any ideas?

Still can't get onto my broadband either. I have the router already configured and it's wirelessly connecting the laptop I'm currently typing on, and also my other wired machine in the office. I've noticed that if I run the Wireless LAN Starter console, it says it can't load the driver. I'm off to investigate this more.

Has anyone got the optical out to work?

- Haven't tried yet, this is the least of my current worries! If I get that far, I'll help where I can!

Does anyone get the runtime error when running the Vaio control?

- Yep. I've tried reinstalling with a couple of different copies of VCC (AR2, AR4, AR5) and nothing has solved this yet.

Anyone had the camera working with the AR21 controls then lost it?

- Yep. It worked for me via My Computer, but not via the Vaio utility. Then during the other mess-arounds it's stopped altogether now.
"Creation of the video preview failed.
Please check the device connection and make sure that the device is not being used by another application or user."

Come on Sony    give us some support for XP  :smileygrin:

Here, here.
I chose my AR51M because I found it to be the best pound-for-pound spec machine I could find. I thought "ah, I'll just rollback to XP - it'll be fine." In hindsight, I would've quite happily paid an extra hundred-quid or so to save myself this hassle.

[synthman]

Hi

At the moment I take it you have the SMBus with the ! next to it? When it installs I think it ends up in System Devices as "Intel(R) ICH8 SMBus Controller - 283E". I can not remember how I got this (probably nearly asleep by 5am on Saturday) but it was either using the SATA drivers from intel (although it does not have a driver its self) or i used the 20MB AR51M SATA update from sony (http://support.vaio.eu/downloads/info/info.asp?site=voe_en_GB_cons&url=Downloads/IN/D/SAT/INDSAT-014...) or it was the audio.rar contenets for the high def audio (the 835221 patch after all the other patches) it has taken me 4 days to get this far.

I tried the bluetooth and it works fine for me so all I can do there is tell you roughthly what I've done...
1. I'll skip most of the first two days as by the end of the second day I had reinstalled Vista with the recovery disks it takes hours! But what I have is all the files from the original Vista install burnt to DVD.
2. After getting the slip streaming to work with the Intel 965 driver I had a clean start with XP no icons or anything.
3. I had about 6 devices unknown in other devices and the audio not working. first port of call was my vista DVD's searching for .inf files and the stuff in the sony directory which appeared to fix some bits.
4.Next I tried to do things the right way and found the devices from the manufacturers and ran the intel matrix utility.
5.Next the wifi and at this point my virus scanner and internet went on
6.Next the bluetooth
7.Then the ethernet
8.Lots of messing around with the Audio all the patches listed finally settling with the audio.rar contents (My registry must be in a bad way after that part)
9.Next the camera (worked at this stage)
10.And hours spent trying to fix the buttons, I think if I had followed the instructions and got the actual files together in the first place it may have worked, but now I can not run the vaio control and the camera has stopped working.
11.Fixed the scroll function on the touch pad using the direcory from Vista.

Do you have the audio working yet without any audio related problems?

In summary either all our vaio's are slightly different (unlikely) or it's the os, or we are all doing things a bit different. I'm using XP home SP2 with auto update on. Keep on trying we will get there in the end

[sy2j]

Hi synthman,

Apologies for the delay. I caught bird flu from my Vista ordeal and have been off the case all week.

Your breakdown was useful though, thanks for that. You've probably cracked it by now, but to answer your query; even though I've seen a lot of people having major problems with the audio, this hasn't caused me any problems at all. It was the information on this thread which worked first time for me.

My plan of action for the weekend is as follows:

- Start again with a fresh install of XP (I'm using XP Pro SP2).
- Follow a combination of your step-by-step and one I saw last week for Utils/Driver installation order to see if this makes a difference.

One strange thing that's worth mentioning which occured before the bird flu;

I use a USB mouse with my laptop which worked from the off when I installed XP. During the course of the downgrade ordeal I took my laptop and plugged it directly into my router via the ethernet cable to check that it was just the ethernet controller problem which was preventing my internet access. This worked fine and I was online straight away.

However when I disconnected and took the laptop back to my desk, and reconnected the USB mouse, it wasn't recognised anymore. I found this weird, so this is one of the reasons that I think a fresh start might be worth a shot.

Have you got any further since Monday?

Regards,

Sy

[synthman]

Hi

I have something new to add. I had all the exclamation marks sorted (without disabling anything) but I came across a program called driver agentand ran it to try and find a camera driver. I t came back saying I was using some wrong drivers for sound, usb, TIxx12 flash card and mouse/touch pad. I had noticed the touch pad no longer had the scroll function after one of the installs and found the driver for it in the vista directory and now it works great. Heres the bit I don't think people will have correct, for the USB driver use http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-025753.htm and download the software installation utility. It appears to have no effect until you look in device manager and the USB changes from standard to Intel ICH8. I would start again but I now have all my software installed and it works.

Outstanding issues:-
Fn, Eject, and AV buttons not working (probably due to not following instructions correctly first time)
Optical out not working
No Blueray or DVD player software (Have not been able to get it out of Vista)
Motion eye not working (probably damaged registry)
Vaio control not working (probably damaged registry)