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pistol

hi we have a sony vaio which seems to have a similar problem which we have to keep switching on and of untiill it desides to work. I took mine to work to have it checked by the IT department and they said that the hard drive is about nackerd. hope this helps any cheers Pete & Jen

Patrick_Phillips

I am afraid this won't be very exact advice because I don't know the laptop you have but...
You should try and get into the "Setup", BIOS or CMOS. These are all effectively different terms for the same thing. Usually most PCs will go to this start up control if you press F2 or DELete during the very first stage after switching on. Sadly I can't tell you which Sony Vaios use or it maybe that it uses another key. But try pressing F2 and DELete fairly rapidly immediately after turning the machine on. Hopefully, you will eventually be rewarded by seeing the BIOS screen.
Again, I don't know your specific machine but...
The will be a number of pages. The first page should tell you what hard disk it thinks it has and even what memory is has.
Look through the pages until you find an option for "Auto Detect" ing the hard disk. If it finds the hard disk in working order, it will tell you so. If the hard disk has crashed, it will tell you that there is no hard disk present.
Lets assume the hard disk hasn't crashed, the next thing is to look for the page which allows you to set memory test at startup. Tell it to do so.
Now make sure you save the "new setup" and exit the BIOS.
At this point it will look for memory present if memory is working and set itself accordingly and then will reboot automatically.
During the bootup it should show the memory that is working as it test it so you can see if is all there or not. Also it now should know about what hard disk there is
If after doing all this, you still get nothing on your screen, it may be that you have a screen connection fault.
Listen for any beeps during start up. If there is a fundamental boot problem, the number of beeps tells you what is wrong.
Again, you need the machine's manual to interpret the beep count.
Hope this helps.
Patrick

SpeedyDux

Alemo, my Sony Vaio laptop is knackered too - motherboard failure just weeks out of warranty. I will never buy another Vaio. Fortunately the HDD was still OK so I put it in an external drive case with USB connector and recovered all my files and photos.

My steam driven 1997 Toshiba Satellite Pro chugs on and on. So, I bought a new Toshy laptop 18 months ago and am still delighted with it.

SD

geraldandannie · Moderator

Chigman

When I get aggro with computers,it`s straight on the phone to my local repair man.He charges me like £20.00 normaly,a small price to pay for something that can literaly drive you up the wall. Very Happy

steve

johng1974