Hello, Picked this one up but I'm thinking I should have passed up on it.
This unit will partially start to boot. For one moment,I hear the CPU fan start and the HHD light's up follow for a very brief flash of "VAIO" in the center of the screen and at the same time "INTEL INSIDE" logo in lower right corner of the LCD screen.
Then nothing but a blank screen(you can see the screens backlight and I'm sure the screen will work fine. Nothing else happens. It just seems stalled. It has 2 DDR 2100 256 Mb chips. I tried one at a time in the 2 slots with no better results. I removed both
ram chips and I only get 1 beep followed by 3 beeps, so the MB seems to see both were missing. I tried removing the Internal wireless card just incase, and that didn't help.
I've read some other posts on the web and this unit seems to have been plauged with quite a few problems. One I saw said there are cold solder joints on the Ram slot holders or bad ram(I don't have another chip to try so far.)
What bothers me is that the CMOS isn't coming up and I can't get into the SETUP to go any further with a diagnoises. I guessing the MB is probably shot but I figured to let you good folks get a crack at possible cures?? I even pressed the Reset button on the bottom with no improvement either. Thanks.
Hello, FOUND out what was it's ills. It was a real challenge. There were 2 major issues. One was that until an O/S was installed the CPU wouldn't communicate with the DVD/CR-RW drive(even though the Boot order showed it 1st in the boot and even where the bios showed it active too). I had to use a different internal DVD Rom drive in order to load the O/S.
The second but annoying issue was the partial boot. It was just briefly show the
"VAIO" & "INTEL INSIDE" logo and then seemingly just STALL in the process. After my
first post, I brought the Laptop to work and simply BLEW-OUT the air port Vents. The exterior was clean and even when I took the laptop apart prior, it seemed pretty clean. When I blew it out, the was a lot of dust the came flying out. To my surprise, later it finally continued to BOOT!!! Then it made sense. This is one of the Last P4's which needs a 90watt power supply to operate. The 70watt Igo Juice couldn't power the boot. I was happy I had the Igo 90 watt model which easily booted it. Since this CPU was the Higher Core voltage type, the motherboard manufacturer either put a Safety feature of checking the CPU's Fan's RPM's OR a Thermal overload
protection with the Heat end of the process. Once the fan and CPU's cooling path was
un-blocked, the unit would just stall and prevent the CPU from loading further.
Once the air blockage was gone and I loaded Windows XP Home, I removed my temporary DVD/RW drive and put back the Sony's Original DVD rom drive. Magically, the original drive works, but before the O/S, it just would not run the WinXP disc!
Interesting problems. I had bought this Sony VAIO for $85 at a local thrift store. I know they knew the laptop was dead prior to putting it out for sale. All things considering, it was a good buy! Thanks for the help and hopefully you other Sony VAIO users out there try blowing out your vents on a regular basis!!!
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