Sony laptop.....:/

[tokyochojin]

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-7G1M and well the other day i turned it on, only to get the safe mode selection screen, i click whatever option i can but they all end up with the laptop resetting.

I reinstalled windows, and all the drivers i need to but i now noticed that the once before partioned drive is no longer split. Anyway the computer seemed to be running okay until i tried to copy my music files over from my external hard drive and now the computer seems to crash somewhat midway into the copying of these files.

I've tried copying over similar big files over and the same thing seems to happen, I've tried fragmenting the drive, only to be told that there are some parts that are unable to be defragmented etc, yet other than this the laptop is running okay. It's strange because i can install games like Football manager and surf the net okay but i can't seem to copy big files across.



I'm guessing i have a problem with my hard drive but was hoping someone with some experience on these things could help me out by offering their diognosis and opinion on what i should do. Is it worth just buying a new laptop compared to the cost of having another harddrive installed etc.

Thanks,

[Magnakai]

I can't find the specs for the Vaio online, but if the hard drive goes, it's not going to be that expensive to replace. Here in the UK, a 120GB laptop hard drive is around £55: Da Link.

It should just be a case of cracking it open, swapping them over and reinstalling windows. If you get someone else to do it, the cost of labor will vary wildly.

[tokyochojin]

Thanks mate. Actually i think the model number is actually vgn fs415e.


I'm not sure that the problem is completely the hard drive. I've had a few blew screens when trying to download too, so I'm thinking it maybe an expensive job as I doubt i'd be able to do it on my own.

[JohnMcL7]

Have you had a look through your event logs at all? They're usually a good place to start troubleshooting a problem like this, you can access them by right clicking 'My Computer' and choosing 'Manage', you should see the Eventviewer. There will be lots of entries here as many routine operations will be logged, you're looking for warning events which occurred when the machine bluescreened. A failing hard drive is usually fairly obvious here as you'll see many warnings with 'disk' as the source, many times over.

If it all looks ok from that front, I'd have a check over the ram - the best way to do this is to use memtest. You basically burn a memtest CD and boot from it, leave it running for a couple of hours and see if there's an errors found.

John

[huxley]

I have a Toshiba laptop and it was doing the same thing, check the ram module if you have one inserted. It was the problem in my case as it had come lose.

[Hohum]

Yeah, check the RAM. Also run memtest to see if that turns up any errors. If it does turn out to be the cause, then I'd recommend reinstalling windows again once resolved as it's highely likely that files installed during setup were corrupted as a result.