Help With Faulty Vaio

I was hoping someone could give some help with a laptop thats gone faulty. It is a Sony Vaio NR21Z/S

It has been working fine for the 3 years i've had it until a few days ago. It boots up as normal, but after approx 60 seconds of being in windows it freezes and everything is unresponsive. If i'm on the internet, IE freezes and says not responding and i get the spinning circle and can't click on anything (i have to hold power button down for several seconds to switch it off). It does the same no matter what i'm doing, if it boots up and i just leave it sitting at desktop it just freezes and becomes unresponsive after 60 seconds or so. Even if i leave it at the user login screen and don't enter my password it freezes after a minute or so.

I started thinking it could possibly be a virus (even though it's extremely unlikely as ivery regularly scan etc). So i tried booting into safe mode but i can't get into safe mode either. When it's launching safe mode, it gets to the screen where it scrolls down the list of drivers its loading and it just freezes on that page.

Quite often now when booting up it will go through a disk check saying there are errors, yet it only started doing this after the freezing issue was happening for a day or 2, so i'm not sure if it's been caused by all the hard rebbots I've had to do pressing down the power button.

I basically cannot use the laptop at all as it only lasts 1 minute.

Can anyone think what the most likely cause is? Software issue? Bios issue? Hardware fault?

I am thinking of doing a full format and installing win 7. The laptop currently runs off vista which i was wanting to get rid of anyway. If i do a fresh install of win 7 after a full format will i need to download any drivers or software to add back on or will windows automatically do it for me?

Thanks for any help.

 

Sound as either OS failure or HDD problems! Have you checked the SMART status of the HDD? What does it say?

 

I can only help you with your drives question. A friend of mine has a Sony NR and she did a fresh install of Windows. It ran fine without downloading any of the drivers but you'll lose some functionality like scroll on the trackpad, fn+ f keys for brightness, and the memory stick slot support unless you download the drivers and install them from Sony's website.

You can find drivers for your computer here: VAIO : Sony Europe

It's possible you won't need to download everything to get everything to work.




I'm not a hardware expert but it's possible you have an HDD issue. If that's the case, then obviously you'd need to replace the HDD. I hope you're competent with taking computers apart because I've looked into disassembling an NR before and it takes a lot of screws to get to the HDD. It's dumb that they didn't design that computer with an easily accessible HDD slot like most modern computers.

Good luck with finding a fix!

 

Thanks for the help guys, I think i'm gonna go ahead and do a complete format and fresh install of win 7. If I still have problems after that, I'll have to put it down as hdd failure. Probably use it as an excuse to buy a new laptop then sell this as faulty/parts only.

 

I have done a full format and clean install of win 7 and everything seems fine now

The only that wasn't working that i use was the scroll on the trackpad as you mentioned, downloaded the driver from your link and works great.

I do have one final question though if anyone can help? Is there anywhere i can download/update the bios? The reason i ask which is something i forgot about which could potentially have caused the problem. I was bought a "cheap" replacement battery at christmas which wouldn't charge and i was told to run a file which changes the bios to allow the battery to charge. I did this but the battery still didn't work. I was wanting to change the bios back to the standard sony one just incase it may be the cause of the problem. Is there anywhere i can download the bios file from to flash it?

Thanks for any help.

 

I would still check the HDD status - takes 1 minute to install HDTune....

There was a similar thread about that Batteries with BIOS cracks - The computer was dead after BIOS update, the guy had to send it to sony for paid BIOS reflashing - I would NEVER install a Chinese BIOS update on first place!!!

All official BIOS updates are to be found on Sony's support website.