video problem on sony vaio laptop

[ArthurDent]

Sony Vaio VGN B100B
Intel Centrino
1.6 GHz Pentium M 725
855GME chipset
1GB + 512MB RAM DDR333

Some days back, my Sony Vaio laptop (model VGN B100B) screen blanked out all of a sudden.

Now the laptop does not boot though it gets power. On power up, the DVD drive spins and the indicator lights for HDD, power and wireless go on; but nothing shows on screen. Nothing shows even when an external monitor is connected.

The hard drive is fine - I removed it and backed up the files.

I tried disconnecting the power cord, removing the battery and holding down the power switch for a minute as has been suggested on some other threads (eg: http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread41145.html ). But nothing showed up on the screen after restoring the power.

I suspect the video chip or the entire motherboard is fried.

Any suggestions on how to isolate the issue and if it is indeed the video, where to get a new chip?

Thanks!

[Suspishio]

If you get no boot data on the screen from the ROM BIOS and if you're sure there is no continued disk activity to indicate that it is booting through, then it seems to me that it can't execute the ROM BIOS. That's a CPU or motherboard failure.

If it boots through because there's obvious disk activity, then I suggest it's screen of VGA circuit failure.

Either way, it's knackered, I'd say.

Hope I'm wrong.

[ArthurDent]

It was a video chip failure on the motherboard, cost $230 to repair.