Vaio/F/430

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About

The Sony Vaio PCG-F430 is a laptop PC, apparently made in the late 1990s or early 2000s. It is obsolete for most purposes.

Specs

  • CPU: Intel 450 MHz Pentium III
  • Display: 14.1" 1024 x 768 LCD Active Matrix
  • Graphics: 1280 x 1024 x 8 bits, 1024 x 768 x 24 bits ...
  • Memory: up to 256 MB

Links

Notes

I'm starting here by just transcribing some notes I wrote down while hunting for various drivers on the web; I'm still looking for the modem driver, and if I find it I'll post the how-to.

One caveat about the hardware: make sure all the screws are back in place on the back of the unit before moving (lifting/lowering) the display-top; my unit developed problems with spontaneously powering off when the lid is flexed, and I think it came from some of the screws not being in place, which may have allowed the system board to develop a hairline crack. (Later, these problems seemed to go away, sometime after the screws were tightened.)

At power-up, makes "Sony sound" but not as loud as F350 does.

Linux

  • kubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) seems to have fixed the problems mentioned below, both in the LiveCD and the installed version. Modem still not supported.
  • The kubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) LiveCD works well enough; the display, sound card, battery manager, and PCMCIA bus all work (finding network cards that will work, especially wireless ones, is another issue; see wireless network cards in Linux. Some of the fixed-height dialogues in the Control Center are too large for the available pixels, and the ok/cancel buttons drop below the edge of the screen. (It's possible that this can be fixed by changing the font size, but that technique did not work when I tried it quickly.) The modem does not seem to be supported, however; /dev/modem does not appear, and none of the system configuration utilities seem to detect a modem.

Drivers

The one driver I had serious difficulty finding when trying to install Windows 98 on this model was the modem driver; see #Modem for more details. I think I had to hunt a bit for the sound and video, but they were both available.

  • Display: NeoMagic Magic Media 256AV 128 bit 2.5 meg
  • Sound: Yamaha DS-XG (used by F4xx series)
  • From the device manager:
    • disk drives:
      • HITACHI_DK23AA-60 (the factory hard drive?)
    • TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-C2202 (yes, a Toshiba inside a Sony)
    • SONY NOTEBOOK CONTROL DEVICE
    • SONY PROGRAMMABLE I/O CONTROL DEVICE
    • INTEL(R) 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
    • Sony CXD3222 OHCI i.LINK(IEEE1394) PCI Host Controller
    • IrDA Fast Infrared Port
      • uses irenum.sys, nscirda.sys
    • HCF 56K Modem (see #Modem)

Modem

  • PCI\VEN_127A&DEV_2005&SUBSYS_8074104D&REV_01
  • windows\system32\drivers\hcf_msft.sys, modem.sys
  • Ebay auction says: IFX-86 or 1-676-063-11 (part number?), compatible with PCG-F370, -F390, -F420, -F430, -F450, -F480, -F490, -F490K, -F520
  • another source says: IFX-86 = A-8056-484-A, but this appears to be a video card, not a modem
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