I’ve got an old Sony Vaio laptop that must be at least ten years old. This thing has been through the wars and served me well. It never missed a beat ubtil a year ago when the HDD started playing up. So I took it to a PC repair shop in Edinburgh, they replaced the HDD with a SSHD & installed Win10. So I was back in business & it’s worked perfectly until a couple of days ago. It was on my desk in its asleep state. I tried to start it up but it wasn’t for booting in.

Start up sequence. Pressing the power button brings up the “VAIO” logo momentarily on the screen, the motherboard fan starts up and a small cursor blinks in the top left hand corner of the screen. The rest of the screen is black. It stays this way until it is forced to power down.

I’ve tried Ctrl/Alt/Del, Win/Ctrl/Shift/B & multiple restarts after removing the battery & power lead to ensure it’s completely powered down. So I’m now at an impasse & have reached the point where the only option I can think of is to take it apart & check all the connections & ribbon cables are still in position.

Any suggestions before I end up with a pile of bits I can’t put back together again?

TIA, Dave

It sounds fairly terminal, given the age of it I wouldn’t be surprised if it a broken/cracked solder or some electrical component has failed – neither of which are generally repairable. It’s still worth opening up and reseating connectors etc. but it’s much more likely something has failed than just worked loose 🙁

Also worth just googling the specific model and boot issues etc. to see if there is a known fixable issue but you’ve probably already done that.

Bit of a long shot.. it could be that the BIOS battery has died so it has lost it’s boot settings etc.

Do a Google search for your particular model – they’re normally fairly easy to replace.

try boot into the BIOS setup, its usually one of these F1, F2, F3

or stick an OS disk or linux live disk into it and try the C key

if it starts up and does not see your newish HD in the boot order that is probably the issue

Take out the ram and the drives. Switch on, listen for beeps. Replace one thing at a time, google beep codes for your BIOS.

almost exactly the same thing with our 10 year old vaio, really was a great machine, doesnt help that sony doesnt support some win 10 drivers any more for old vaios

Locating BIOS battery was not trivial as was wrong side of motherboard

at somepoint you just have to let go & move on….

In the end got a refurbished dell for £100 off ebay, Win 10 is good enough that a lot of the benefits of Vaio (Vaio Care was brilliant & helped make it Mac slick) have been addressed by Microsoft anyway now- dell is a lower spec but newer model so runs as well & currently doing very well as a honeschooling workhorse