Friend's Sony Vaio Laptop Acting Up? Very Peculiar - please help

Aleksbgbg · December 30, 2015

My friend has a Sony Vaio with an i5-3230M and a 7570/7670 AMD GPU.

When his laptop fan is not blowing hard (you can't hear it) he can't change brightness. When the fan glitches out and starts blowing hard, then he can change the brightness. I find this very weird and don't find any solutions.

What might have caused this? It seems that his Windows 8.1 is causing this as he said he got the OS recently from Win 7. What can I do to help him? I have no physical access to the laptop but I can use teamviewer or tell him to do what is necessary.

Gikero · December 30, 2015

Any recent hardware or software changes? Such as an update to Windows 10? I ask because I've seen a lot of drivers wig out when being migrated to Windows 7/8.1 to Windows 10. Like stated, start with checking drivers and BIOS/UEFI settings.

Sauron · December 30, 2015

The problem is that sometimes these laptops use proprietary drivers to control screen brightness and other functionality, and it gets baked in the windows installation before it gets sold. Updating to 8.1 might break that sort of stuff.

You can try updating your drivers, but I wouldn't hold my breath.