***For the short version, check the tl;dr at the bottom***

Let me preface this by saying that I don't understand too much about video cards. I game every once and a while, mostly older games which have easy specs, but for the most part, I rely on my computer for other things and trust my friends to steer me right when upgrading.

I own a sony viao that's a couple years old. Recently I bumped my OS up from vista to 7. The upgrade went as smoothly as one could expect, save for stuff related to my video card. Booting up Steam and attempting to play a game resulted in my being informed that I needed a directX 9.0c compatible card. This didn't seem right, and upon further digging, I found that at the very least, my 8400M GT should be DirectX 10.0 compatible. I downloaded the appropriate drivers from Nvidia's site but they said there was no detectable upgrade for me and immediately quit. Trying a download from microsoft's DirectX site went through an entire installation and optimization process that ultimately changed absolutely nothing.

At this point, I tried to boot up solitare, and windows informed me that hardware acceleration is not turned on and/or not supported by my video card. Checking the settings, I can see that hardware acceleration is clearly maxed. At this point, I figure the problem is very fundamental and I'm at a loss as to where to even start. Checking System Information, there is nothing that clearly stands out to me as indicative of the specific type of card I run, simply the words "standard VGA graphics adapter" a couple of times. I have no clue if this relates to simply the output or something more fundamental, but I can find no clue that this computer recognizes my card at all and at this point I have no idea what to do. I'd appreciate any help you could give me.

Tl;dr: Upgraded to windows 7, Windows tells me 8400M GT graphics card does not support hardware acceleration nor DirectX 9.0c. Tried updating drivers/DirectX software - got squat. Unsure if computer is even recognizing card.

This is a laptop. You should get all drivers from Sony support for that model, not Nvidia. Does the Vaio's CPU support a 64-bit Operating System?