Sony Vaio Battery Replacement (VGN-CR-313H)

It has been three years since I have bought my Sony Vaio, Long back my battery has gone and I wasn't getting much of battery life (approx 10 mins). So mostly it was always plugged in when working, but because of the battery it was getting heated up too much, and it was never on Lap Top!!

Recently it crashed because of a RAM issue, and I took it to my friend if he could open it up and remove a RAM and check with other RAM, I did not had the right equipment to open it up. I am going to order one from EBAY and hope I would be able to do it next time. It was finally up when the faulty RAM was removed. Now that he also had cleaned the cooling fans the only thing that was causing heating was my old battery. He suggested to order a battery on Ebay from Hong-Kong which you would get at 1/5th of the price you pay when you buy it from Sony. An order was placed. It arrived in about 2-3 weeks time. 

Only when I opened up the pack, there was a small CD saying that you may have to update the BIOS to use this intelligent battery. I am not sure how a battery can be intelligent, so I just plugged in the new battery and it wasn't booting the laptop. When I checked it with my friend I came to know that the SONY BIOS reads the serial number of battery from its EEPROM and hence it would not allow non-oem battery to work with a VAIO. Now I understood why they have asked to patch bios for working with INTELLIGENT battery. 

But since I had windows 7, 64 bit OS, the software tool they have provided to update bios did not work because of USER access permission error as below.

Phoenix Secure WinFlash "Cannot load driver C:\....phlashnt.sys. This driver has been blocked from loading. Error code:1275.”

Now I had to fall back to windows xp to run this tool to update bios and then install windows 7 back. Now that flash is updated the battery is working fine, and I am getting about 2+ hours of backup. I am happy finally. I just updated this in blog, so that for anyone who bought non-oem battery on ebay, don't assume that your battery is FAKE, but it is intelligent, and you need to patch your bios. Keep in mind that any failure while updating bios would brick your laptop, and it would be rendered useless. Make sure you back up bios before updating and you know the right procedure and tools.

For any help, do leave a comment, I would try to help out.

Sony VAIO Camera Driver for Ubuntu

After installing Ubuntu and configuring it to look like windows, one thing that was really lacking was the web cam driver, I could not do video call from Gmail. This time with little easy, I found a link which help to install the driver easily.

First check which is your camera, by typing in the command lsusb, which shows something below.

Bus 006 Device 002: ID 045e:00a4 Microsoft Corp. 
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 044e:3012 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 044e:3013 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 044e:3010 Alps Electric Co., Ltd Bluetooth Adapter
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 044e:3011 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]

The camera is from Ricoh Co. Ltd, VGP-VCC6[R5U870] 

The packages provided (both source and binary) include only the loader software and do not contain the microcode, whose copyright and license status is unclear. Instead, a simple shell script is provided that can download and install the microcode directly from the upstream repository.

Installation

========

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:r5u87x-loader/ppa

2. sudo apt-get update

3. sudo apt-get install r5u87x

4. sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

(Step 1 only works on Ubuntu 9.10 and newer. On 8.04 you will need to add this PPA to your APT sources manually.)

Supported hardware

================

05ca:1803 Flybook V5

05ca:1810 HP Pavilion Webcam

05ca:1835 Sony Camera VGP-VCC5 (used on Sony Vaio SZ laptops)

05ca:1836 Sony Camera VGP-VCC4 (used on Sony Vaio FE laptops)

05ca:1837 Sony Camera VGP-VCC4 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)

05ca:1839 Sony Camera VGP-VCC6 (used on Sony Vaio CR laptops)

05ca:183a Sony Camera VGP-VCC7 (used on Sony Vaio SZ and TZ11 laptops)

05ca:183b Sony Camera VGP-VCC8 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)

05ca:183e Sony Camera VGP-VCC9 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)

Hope this helps !

Windows 7, With All Drivers on Sony VAIO CR313H

Recently I have upgraded from the so called the slower version of windows (Windows Vista) to windows 7, the latest and the faster one. Everything looked nice, until I realize that my webcam is not working when I try to use Google talk on Gmail for video call. I was bit worried, thought it is not so difficult to fix it, as I knew camera driver is missing, and I did some google-ing and found that it’s not so easy to get your camera working on the laptop, mostly because it is a 2 year old laptop and Sony Vaio’s official site does not give any drivers and nowhere else also the exact drivers are available.

 

Now I did worry a bit more, but without losing hope I did some more research on the internet and found that there is driver for the web camera which many people have claimed to work on VAIO laptops. I did give a try, and amazing! It’s working!! Here is a link to download the same if you are having similar problems.

 

I was wondering, if other things on my laptops are working fine, I found that the display and the graphics drivers are missing, and Bluetooth and WLAN switch setting is missing, SD Card Reader is not working, None of the function keys are working, especially the brightness control keys, and Fn+F7 (Dual Mode + Monitor Extension). This is now a serious problem, I thought I must fix this. I called up one of my friend who works for Sony; he was on his way back to native for his sister’s engagement, so wasn’t so useful.

 

I did more search on the internet to find the display driver for my Intel graphics accelerator x3100, and after installing that the graphics did flicker few times, but worked wonders and I could see all the options I was able to see when Vista was there, I was happy, this was the first success. Here is a link if you want to download the same driver for your CR313H laptop, or with the same Intel graphics accelerator.

 

Later for the others, I started searching to make function keys working, and while searching, I found a forum on windows 7, where things which are solved are marked as SOLVED, which helped find the thread easily, and I found memory card driver, you can download it here.

 

I also got a thread, where someone had installed all the utilities needed for the functions keys to work properly. You have to download and Install the following Utilities from the SONY VAIO ftp link ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/VAIO/ORIGINAL/ . And Note that all the below needs to be installed in the same order for it to work properly. Download the LATEST version available for each of them and install.

1. Sony Firmware Extension Parser (SFEP) Driver
2. Sony Shared Library
3. Setting Utility Series
4. Vaio Control Center (if you want it)
5. Vaio event service

This makes all the features on my SONY VAIO laptop work. If you have any problems, feel free to write to me.