trouble shooting help. old s series

i have a older sony s series bought about 2.5 years ago which was maxed out back then. about a year ago, something went wrong with the computer. when booting up, it would reach the windows boot screen and then the screen would flash blue for a split second and then reboot. booting in safe mode is fine, and scanning for all viruses showed nothing, and even after reformating and reinstalling everything it would still go into the rebooting loop.

i was finally able to pin point the problem to the video card driver. if i disable the video card driver, then the computer would startup without any problems. reinstall the driver then it would reboot again. called sony back then and they were no help. the service girl recommended replacing the motherboard, but in the end i just bought a sz170p/c.

anyways, i've been wanting to put together a simple system to hook up to my tv to play streaming video from a taiwanese website with local tv programming--nothing fancy. the old lappy would be perfect.

how hard is it to replace the motherboard and what kind of costs am i looking at. also, one of my friend suggested that the motherboard is fine. it's the video card that went funky. is it possible to replace just the video card in that laptop (i was under the impression that the s series had integrated graphics).

what are your suggestions?

 

Whats the model of your laptop?

Try updating the video cards drivers with third party ones from Omega(for ati cards) or LaptopVideo2Go(Nvidia cards)

Updating video cards drivers in XP

 

more info:
the laptop was bought in 08/04. i don't remember the exact specs but it was the top of the line model back then (cpu is a pentium M 2ghz i think?) and ram was maxed out. price paid was some where in the $3k range from sony online.

i found this: will it work?
http://cgi.ebay.com/Sony-VIAO-VGN-S...6QQihZ003QQcategoryZ80204QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

the laptop is sitting at home so i can't get the model number right now. without booting up the computer, what's the quickest way to check whether it's a pentium M or a core solo? the online prices for the 2 different motherboards is about a $200 difference.

 

i've actually tried several different video card drivers. 3rd party, sony, and various versions. all end up with the same result. was this a common problem with the s series?

 

bump!

happy saturday everyone! little more advice pls

 

here's an update if anyone's interested.

i checked for a video card driver update for the radeon 9700 in the s170p. i cannot download the driver from ati, so i checked sony's site. surprisingly i found 2 bios updates that both deal with a problem with the graphics:

bios update r0072g4
"This utility updates the Phoenix® BIOS to version R0072G4, and addresses an issue with occasional graphic corruption."

bios update r0071g4
"This utility updates the Phoenix® BIOS to version R0071G4, and resolves the following issues:
Video corruption when power management is enabled
DVD playback issues"

i just finished flashing the bios and will enable the video card again followed by a reboot. wish me luck!

 

it work!!!





for like 20min. sigh. error message popped up saying video card driver failed during operation or something like that. little help guys? is it time for a new motherboard? can i replace the video card? it's a mobility radeon 9700

 

btw, i just found out that all the motherboards from s1xx and s2xx have this problem and sony extended the warranties for an extra year. wish i knew about this 14months ago. i could have got it fixed for free.

sony tech support is not very good is it? since i ordered it from sony's website and even registered it with sony, one would expect at least an email from sony telling me about the issue with the mobo eh? http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/news-item.pl?mdl=VGNS170P&news_id=109

the date that SB was posted was about a month after my vaio died.

 

Wow.. this problem just arose two days ago with my VGN-S270P purchased almost at the exact same time as yours. This is after having replaced the hard drive which died a while back. Sorry to not have answers, just wanted to say that I would love to know if you learn anything. Thanks- Jon