Sony vaio vgn-190 motherboard help

I bought my vaio last July and apparently overworked the bugger since the thing crapped out on me. During mid-use it shut off and won't start back up. It's not charging and won't even boot up. I think it's the motherboard but before I go tearing the thing open I wanted to get advice.

Am I way off base or am I correct in my assumption that it's the motherboard? Since Sony is fun and proprietary, I can't find any replacement motherboards. My options are limited. It would cost me somewhere near $700 to have them look at it which is daunting since it's half the price that I paid to purchase it. Any suggestions?

 

Get a new laptop. It's possible that it's not the mobo, but another component that's killing the mobo (NVIDIA self-destructing GPUs anyone?).

You're going to pay a pretty penny no matter what's broken, but in the case of the faulty 8000 series GPUs for example, doesn't matter how many times you send it in to get fixed, it'll die again soon.

 

Even if the GPU failed, the laptop can still bootup

plus, I doubt the OP even has a Nvidia graphics card in his laptop..

 

Yeah that was what I was thinking. Why invest money into something that obviously wants to die.

 

What model is your laptop..

you only said VGN-190
is it the FW190, or SR190, etc?

 

it's the vgn-fz190

 

Hmm... Tony, I think some 1330 users had their NVIDIA GPUs heat up to the point that their mobo's got damaged, and tons and tons of mobos and GPUs were replaced and they just kept breaking.

 

I found this on Ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sony-Vaio-VGN-F...ptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?_trksid=p3286.m20.l1116

 

That's funny. I found that same ad a few days ago. I thought it tempting but I don't know how trustworthy it is. If anybody is going to sell my laptop for scraps it's going to be me.

 

Well from what I have read from the Sony's Nvidia failure thread people can still bootup, and still use their laptops just fine if they have the nvidia driver disabled.

Dell's laptops are known to have bad built quality... That's why I bought a Sony.
I have a Macbook Pro with 8600M GT in it, and I game on it pretty much everyday, but it's still working just fine for me.

 

O_O... that's quite impressive.

Maybe you have a lucky GPU out of the batch of failures... or Dell really just doesn't know how to build for crap.

 

I used to like Dell, but they kind of cheaped out on all their laptops lately, using crappy materials and have terrible built quality..
When I look at all my friends' super plastic-looking Dell laptops, I'm always glad I got Sony and Apple's laptops.. and I would just smile when they ask each other how many times have they called customers service, or how many times have they sent their laptops in.. lol

 

I used to have an Inspiron 6000... semi-decked out.

...That thing had heat issues like ****... All the writting and stickers on the bottom... pretty much melted off. It overheated to a point where it forced shutdown and the DVD burner's laser was destroyed.

When I tried to open it up, I noticed some screws were missing on the bottom. Why I never looked before I don't know... but I have Dell trust issues now.

 

My vaio was always burning my hands during use. That thing had definite heat issues. I too bought sony with the impression that it would last awhile. 3 months out of warranty and it decides to quit on me. Ah well... Guess I'll just build a shuttle.

and it has the Nvidia 8400

 

AH HA! It did have a faulty GPU!

Skip out on fixing it. Sorry to say, but replacements will only get you back to where you started. :S

Invest in a new laptop is my reccomendation.

 

yay.....*sigh*

Thanks for confirming my guess.

 

For your information:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=289274&highlight=NVIDIA

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=268277&highlight=NVIDIA

The NVIDIA GPUs of the 8000 series had innate design flaws. They're all broken, and it's NVIDIA's fault mostly. There can be some blame assigned to the laptop manufacturers for possibly bad cooling systems, but it's a laptop for goodness sakes. NVIDIA was a little silly during this whole fiasco.

 

That doesn't mean it's automatically the GPU's fault.. But idk, if it's out of warranty, you should just get a new laptop instead

 

You're right. You can't really just say it's the GPU, ususally it's a combination of things. However, the fact is that if Tekno were to take in his laptop, the repairs he would pay for would likely see the exact same components back into the laptop, which would likely cause another failure down the road.

I'm just erring on the safe side, cut your losses before they get any worse pretty much.