Has My Sony Vaio NB PC Gone To Heaven???

Now that I am spilling my beans on my notebook pcs, there is my Sony Viao notebook PCG-8A2L that I bought in 2002. In 2005, it gave me problems with flickering LCD screen. For a while, when I knocked on the middle of the back space under the SONY logo, it would stop the flickering. But things got worse. Finally there is no more flickering, no more showing of anything on the screen. The computer will not start. If I push the start button, it would want to start but then just die. Even with the knocking. Everything is then dead silent. This mystery to me is probably not a mystery to the techies and geeks here. So please do tell.

This Sony has been sitting on my shelf doing nothing ever since, with all the files and data trapped in the hard drive. The questions are:

1) What could be the problems to this phenomenon? Is it a mother board problem? A wire connection problem? A LCD problem (which I doubt)? I guess no one will know for sure unless if the computer is opened up for an examination. My problem is, being Zeus' descendant, I carry a lot of static electricity with my hands. Don’t want to open it up and zap the poor thing to real death. LOL!!!

2) When bought in 2002, this Sony notebook pc costed over 3k, but these days NBs are dirt cheap. Is it worth the while fixing? Perhaps it is worth to take it to a repair shop and pay them for a diagnostic? Don’t mind paying for that. It is just that a lot of those places are of unknown quality. Don’t know if they will be able to give me a honest to goodness repair job. (E.g., some computer store repair department ruined my $2000 Compaq when I took it in to install a DVD drive 6, 7 years ago.)

3) The only thing is if I want the data from the hard-drive. (Sorry I did not back up half of the data on this 40 GB machine.) Is it possible to fetch the files by transferring the hard-drive to another similar Sony model, something I can get cheap from places like eBay?

Again thanks for the insights in dealing with this situation.

l69norm said:

A brand new laptop is between $299 and $399 in the US this week (Black Friday). Don't bother with the old one.

Have the Sony laptop drive taken out and installed in an external USB disk drive shell ($20) with a "2.5 to 3.5 IDE adapter kit" ($10). BTW, It's not that hard to do yourself.

Connect into the USB port on your desktop or new laptop and copy all the stuff you need from the Sony drive.

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Thanks for the insight. That is probably the best approach to the situation.

Whisperwolf said:

There are two most likely possibilities. The first of which is the florescent panel behind the screen has worn out. This is the major failure in a flatscreen of any nature, sooner or later the panel will wear out. It is replaceable, but Sony might charge the earth to do it. The second is the Inverter Board which is the small circuit board that creates the screen image, but I'm inclined to think that since you had flickering, same as you get when a florescent tube in your kitchen is wearing out, it's more likely to be the back panel.



Depends on how much you like your existing machine, and how much Sony will do it for.



Yes, and Future Shop will do all that for you for $70. Trust me, I did that when my HP unexpectedly had a motherboard failure. They wanted $70 + tax but got all the data off and onto DVDs for me.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the insight. I took the Sony Notebook to a computer shop and see if the people there can find out what the problem is. I also had the internal HDD taken out and encased in an enclosure so I can extract the data out. They suspect it is a motherboard problem but no word from them yet. I am under the assumption that the Sony is not economical to repair. So on Black Friday, I bought a Toshiba Satellite Notebook PC for $500 (after $200 mail in rebate). It has 2GB of RAM, 160 GB internal HDD, AMD Athlon 64X2 Duo Core Processor, 15.4" screen although I find this Windows Vista OS annoying to deal with. I guess it is a matter of getting used to.

Perhaps I should auction off the Sony on eBay. Someone else may find it useful instead of letting it collect dust on the shelf.