Vaio vgn-ar11s

[iangriffian]

Hello!

If anyone can assist me I would be very grateful.

I have a Vaio Vgn-AR11s, it's around 4 years old. Recently I have had a problem where the screen has been covered in strange multi-coloured lines and blocks, the screen is still visable behind but the patterns obliterate anything behind them. They range from lines, blocks and sometimes what looks like tartan! Looking at the Sony support site it appears that there maybe an acknowledged issue with the Nvidia card and my model is in the list.  The page advises checking if the lines are still present when in the bios screen which they are which it says is a hardware issue and not covered by the repair cover?

Before I discovered the potential Nvidia issue, to clear the lines from the screen I attempted to recover my laptop using the recovery disks I created when I first bought the laptop. I opted for a full recovery as I had all my important documents backed up on an external HD.  This has not been successful as my laptop got half way through loading windows and came up with the message "missing or corrupt \windows\system32\config\system" I was able to start in safe mode for a while but I then got the message "windows is not fully installed, run setup again"

I have now been able to recover my laptop using another copy of XP with the raid/sata drivers added as for a while it told me I had no hard drive. I now have a laptop that will load xp (pro, mine was media centre) but is unable to do anything else as it has no drivers, I can't even use the cd drive to try and load them. Before attempting recovery I did a hardware diagnostics on my system and it reported no errors.

I guess my question is what I should do next, Should I try to address the screen lines issue with a new hard drive if that is the fault (I think there are two in my machine so how would I know which is faulty?)  or should I recover my laptop with Sony provided recovery discs if it is even possible to get them as mine are obviously corrupted. I don't know the best thing to spend money on fixing first or if I should abandon it completely and buy a new unit. As ever, money is tight and I need the cheapest option.

Sorry if I rambled.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Ian

[Blencogo]

Hi Ian,

Does the screen fault persist when using XP Pro?

I suppose the important question is "exactly how old is your Vaio".

If you go to the Support pages for your model here: -

http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/preinstalled/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-AR11S

and click on the 'House' symbol for 'Support', you will be taken to the Support Page where under 'Hot News' you will see a link to "Distorted Video ...................failure of the nVidia graphics chip.".

Read Sony's statement on this fault and see if it referrs to your situation.  If it does you will have to contact Vaio Support on the premium out-of-warranty telephone support line.

If the statement does not refer to your situation you will have to take advice from one of Sony's Service Partners to see if a repair is economical.