I came across a Sony VAIO PCG-FX150 with a few issues. I wound up purchasing another similar VAIO off of eBay (a PCG-FX340) and combining the two units’ parts together to make one dang nice retro laptop. As far as a good battery goes, that remains to be seen.
Nonetheless, one hurdle I had to face was that I needed the drivers for the Fn key combos to work right, for stuff like brightness adjustment, etc. I depend on that a lot, because I expect my doggone laptop to function the way it should. I like key combos and I cannot lie.
I was fortunate to have received recovery discs with the second machine that I purchased, which seem to have been burnt by the seller of the machine. Wow, they really went out of their way to help me out! Very cool. Anyway, I tried to run the applications disc on my VAIO, but it wouldn’t let me, because mine was a FX150, and it was looking for a 340! Thanks, Sony!
But I wasn’t going to stop there. I found out that I could extract the disc content with the utility known as KCAP. I downloaded it, but then I was faced with a new issue: the folder names were uninformative! How was I supposed to go into each one of them, and find out which one was what I wanted?
Lo and behold, I found a way. Each folder usually contains a Setup.ini that tells you what it is. It’s annoying trying to go into each folder to find out what each one was, which I did for a while, but I decided to write a really simple Python script to deal with the problem, which I have attached to this post. I call it the Sony VAIO Recovery Disc Folder Renamer. I’m licensing this under the WTFPL, because I do not care whatsoever. It was so easy, but yet I’m hoping it will actually prove useful to someone, at least one person out there, who might run into the same situation as me.
It’s pretty easy to work with, all ya gotta do is just put the script into the same folder as all of your extracted recovery disc files are, and run it with Python 2.
I’m also attaching KCAP, just in case something happens where it becomes nigh-impossible to find anywhere else. For information on how to use KCAP, see this page on Archive.org.
Enjoy!