For any of you out there with a Sony Viao VGN-FZ11S looking to install windows 7, it is possible and here are a few tips! All the links below will point to the Sony Europe website as this model is not available in the US apparently.
64 or 32bit?
First of all you will have the option of installing 64 or 32bit versions. Upon contacting Sony they told me this particular motherboard only supports 2GB of RAM. So you may as well install the 32bit version as there are more drivers available and with only 2GB of RAM at your disposal it kind of defeats the purpose of installing 64bit (i.e. to utilise more than 3-4GB of RAM).
Install Disc
The installation process is easy, just pop in the 32bit disc and run. I chose a custom install for a fresh install, simply because I don’t trust window’s supposed ability to keep all my old files intact from Vista. Install as usual otherwise.
NVidia Driver
This laptop comes with a Geforce NVidia 8400M GT graphics card. Basically don’t bother to go to the NVidia website as their driver for this graphics card will not work in conjunction with the Sony Viao hardware. Instead got to the Sony update and download the latest graphics driver from there. You can click on this link to go straight there…
Sony Viao Updates
If you also want to re-activate Sony Viao’s updater this can be found on the following link. It’s up to you whether to install this, but the Viao’s seem to have some customized stuff that might be useful.
For a full list of updates check the main page of this section, which also has a link to windows 7 updates specifically.
http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/updates/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-FZ11S
Hope that helps. Enjoy Windows 7… anything’s got to be better than Vista!