PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Sony Vaio woes

Hey Keebo--

I've seen this scenario more than a few times. Don't be quick to blame the install disk(s). Most of the time, there is something else stopping the full install, typically would be a cooling situation, or more accurately, a lack thereof. Laptops are notorious for getting the heatsink/cooling pkenum all plugged up with lint and housedust. A blowout of the CPU cooling area may be all that is needed, although in a scant few cases it may be that the fan needs replaced. Attempts to install without first addressing that situation can lead to exactly what you describe, but it is not due to the disks themselves being bad, which is actually quite the rarity with OEM restore and install disks in my observation of many puters in the shop, what happens is that the CPU goes into overheat during the install and that stops the show. A can of blowout air may just do the trick without even having to disassemble the lappy.

After cleaning out the cooling ducts and fins, after making sure that the fan is operating properly, if you still have installation/restore troubles with your disks, read on.

There is a way.

I've successfully reatored old machines like this one by using *whatever mfr's OS installation disks at hand* no matter the mfr of the laptop.

For example, I've used Dell disks to install OS on many different brands.

First thing I do is visit the mfr's support webpage for the exact brand and model involved, in your case that would be the Sony vaio support->drivers page, and then, using another working computer that is on the web, I manually download all the drivers available.

Next I copy those downloaded drivers to a USB stick. I don't try organizing them or putting them into folders on the USB stick, I simply drop them into the stick at the highest level.

Then I go ahead and run the wrong mfr's install disks on the target broken computer.

Do not try to access the internet or anything else after doing that, as there will be lots of driver clashes at that point.

Instead, use the Control Panel to visit the Device Manager and take a look at the list with an eye towards which drivers have the yellow exclamation point in front of them first.

Run the Driver Installer for each of those, one after the other, but one at a time.

Then also install any of the remaining drivers that are on that USB stick but were not yellow exlamation point in the Device Manager.

Reboot.

Check operation.

You may have to have the code from the bottom of the laptop in order to register the OS manually with ms, or it may do it by itself, either way it will let you know if you need to register the OS by telling you that you only have 30 days to do so or the OS will stop working.

This works. But it will not have some of the original mfr's bloatware in there, which imo may be a good thing.

You can even go so far as to *borrow* someone else's OS install disks to do this.

Of course, if you would rather install a different OS than original, you can usually do that as well, say, for XP, but first make sure that the original mfr of the puter has published drivers installs for that OS and model of puter before taking that plunge.

Takes more of your own time, but gets you there...

Lastly, if all of that sounds to be more than you want to chew, consider finding the local mom 'n pop computer repair place and drop it off with the disks and tell them the symptoms along with a "call with estimate first" command. Any shop worth its salt should have OS install disks onhand for anything.


--Mac