TechniX

Sony Vaio SZ-74B is aimed for Japan market, it means you may buy SZ-74B in Japan only. It also means that you can get support only from Sony Vaio Japan. The laptop has japanese keyboard, Windows Vista OS Home Premium edition in japanese, FeliCa port (developed by Sony and integrated into Vaio laptops) … and almost everything in japanese.

Lots of people bought SZ-74B in Japan and tried to reinstall Vista in English version. You might strictly follow the driver installation process which is strongly recommended by Sony, however, some troubles would probably happen. The most annoying one is with the motion eye webcam. Following the troubleshooting wizard in Vista, you may see Microsoft say that it is the FeliCa port which causes the conflict and all you have to do is to install the driver for FeliCa properly.

First of all, here’s a must-have drivers and utilities for your SZ74B.

You should have a look at this blog entry, and this driver is perhaps what you’re looking for. Following the instruction in the blog entry to install drivers for FeliCa properly, then go to Device Manager and you can see FeliCa port in the list. Final step is a bit tricky to install the right driver for the motion eye webcam: please use the webcam driver for SZ 6 series instead of using the one for SZ 4 series (bear in mind that SZ74B is SZ-4 series!). In Device manager - Sony Vaio VGN Visual Communication Camera - Update driver - Picking from list… - browse to SZ 6 series webcam driver (very important!!!). Make sure that in Device manager - Imaging device… there’s no icon with exclamation mark. If there is, uninstall it. If there’s “USB Webcam” then update driver and point to SZ 6 series driver.

The tricky way above is not highly recommended, but as long as you could not find any patches or updates from Sony Vaio official support website, you can follow the above suggestion as one of some solutions to make your webcam work.