constant crashes

Hey

I have a Sony VGNSR190 with Vista Home Premium Clean Install. I've been getting random crashes on my computer where either

1. my mouse pointer can move but i can't click on anything so i end up just holding the power button for 6 seconds to shut down the computer
2. i leave for a while and come back and the screen is a bunch of weird meshed pixels so i have to hit the power button again
3. i leave for awhile and resume from standby but the screen doesn't show up, its still a black screen

What can I do? I think it might have to do with my ati graphics card, but I can't tell. I know that occasionally when i hit the power button adn then restart the computer there will be two ati graphic card icons in my taskbar and then when i mouse over one of them disappears. I've also reformatted a couple of times and installed all my drivers

Thanks

 

Have you tried just to restore it to the original state, at delivery? You mentioned "reformat", meaning a clean install? Try the recovery.

cheers ...

 

i'm unable to do so because the restore partition is gone and my backup image discs are scratched. i don't think it would make a difference though

 

Have you checked in event viewer, see if anything untoward is showing.

 

Try downloading the appropriate Sony special apps/utilities for your model. Try also getting the updates via Sony updates for your model and see.

cheers ...

 

i've already downlaoded the appropriate updates and drivers.

for the event viewer i'm not exactly sure what to look under. i've seen some errors but nothing that relates to my computer crashing

 

Things fine before you install ATI drivers on a clean install? If not, it could be a hardware problem... Also, have you tried various drivers you can find via this thread?

 

I always install the ati graphics card driver soon after i do the clean install because otherwise the resolution is bad, so i am not able to tell. And yes I have tried various drivers but all of them still result in crashes

 

You got this ATI driver from Sony eSupport, or just picked it up from outside? This sometime (many times) makes a big difference on many brands.

cheers ....

 

Yes, but did you also get the Sony-specific things, like the Sony_utilities? For example, on my .Sony VAIO PCG-Z1A (a now-ancient machine, 6 y.o. and counting), I don't get the performance balancer or the powerpanel unless I d/l and install the Sony-specific utilities, not just the standard drivers for all of the various hardware components.

 

i have everything listed on the esupport site for Sony VAIO VGN-SR190 drivers

 

I hate to be a nit-picker, but that doesn't answer the question, which was, do you have all of the Sony-specific utilities and apps as well as all of the drivers?

 

i have everything on this page

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNSR190&SelectOS=28

including the notebook utilities, shared library, etc. (is that what you're talking about)

 

Yup, that was what I was talking about; _Sony is paranoid and its systems are very proprietary, and a lot of innocuous software that looks "optional" turns out to be not quite so "optional" as it looks.

Ok, looking back at your original post, the source of your problems is probably related to your video drivers, because those are notorious for causing a screen-freeze like you see (although that's not guaranteed, any process that manages to get high priority, and then deadlocks while executing in high priority, can cause a screen-freeze because until the high-priority process finishes, most of the video-related processes cannot continue to execute).

Have you gone through your event viewer/event logs to see if anything has been logged at the time one of these screen-freezes happens? Also, you said that you have been accustomed to turning the system off by pressing and holding the power button - have you run chkdsk afterward? I ask because it's possible for repeated kills like that to cause some file corruption on disk, and it's best to prevent that from becoming a problem by running chkdsk.

 

i've gone through the event logs but i can't seem to find anything significant or anything that seems to be related to a crash. i haven't done the chkdsk yet but i will.

 

I ran the CHKDSK, but it keeps freezing at 82% on Step 5 of 5. The previous steps did not find any errors though.