Laptops SOS : VAIO acting up

[mjkn79]

Ok so heres the story:

VAIO CR 24bgn series : It came preloaded with Vista Home Premium, i loaded xp on it. It was runnign fine until today when suddenly after booting into xp once we do anything cpu intensive the system freezes up.:S

The BIOS is too basic and doesn't even show the temperature :ROFL:

My gut feeling is that the cpu cooler fan is gone kaput, i cant feel any hot air blowing from it or any noise at all.

Any idea how much a replacement fan or cooler unit will cost ?, and any known service center in Banaglore that you guys know of. Sony Service Center is like a fleecing unit; their charges are too high and the service personnel assume too much.

Any help on this will be gr8

Cheers ...

 

[Party Monger]

Er first please format and then come to any conclusion..

chances of this being a hardware problem is 1%..

Probably its a driver/ malware problem..

 

[nitant]

Use a Fan Control software like SpeedFan/NHC/etc, to figure out if your fan is working. Most systems will warn you if Fan is kaput.

I am assuming your fan is working at this point

Most likely you will find a thick layer of dust on the heatsink, where the fan blows in air. My friends VAIO had a separate opening for the fan. If yours does simply remove fan and clean with brush(eg: toothbrush)

If not, find a dis-assembly guide (thats for n00bs personally), take a deep breath and open the damn thing up, in-order to clean it

And if your fan is dead, get a replacement from eBay.

 

[mjkn79]

Update : Prob with fan ruled out as i booted into safe mode and left the system running for sometime with the vents blockedhyeah: and the fan kicked into action.
I booted into normal mode and again left the system running this time when it started hanging after say about 10 min into boot i noticed the hdd light was continuously on and eerie silence from the system, then the unthinkable flashed across my mind "Lymphosychoma of the hdd" i gues when system starts paging the disk up its coming across bad clusters.
I used "Hiren Boot disk" Hiren's BootCD 10.0 - www.hiren.info amazing tool heh

ran a surface scan of the disk using some utility i guess its was ontrack disk manager. It stopped the sacn midway just within 2 % as it located bad clusters. Then i used hdd scan utility available in hiren's boot disk, once you choose mini xp as the OS u wanna load for troubleshooting. It detected bad clusters within the first 4000 mb of the disk, the rest of the disk was fine.

Am gonna try creating a buffer partition of about 5 gb as an unallocated partition and try loading XP again , followed by Win 7. Will keep you guys posted. :cool2:

 

[mjkn79]

Update :

Issue resolved : I created a 5gb partition and left it unallocated so that the OS does not touch it i have created this partition towards the bigennig of the disk as the bad sectors were in the first 4000 mb of the entire disk. I thern installed XP, so far so good everything's running smooth.

I also installed a custom version of Win 7 (experience edition) released in Jul in dual boot mode. The Lappy's running faster than ever in fact much faster than XP.:hap2:. I was also lucky enough to get all the drivers working including the biometric reader :cool2: