Vaio Screen (nothing but white) can be seen....

[nikonian]

My 217M Vaio has suddenly turned white, as soon as I press the power button on, its white and nothing displays on it.

The laptop works perfectly well apart from this, I'm able to post this because I'm using an external monitor.

I don't know when this happened, my daughter was first to tell me about the problem, she uses the laptop for homework.

I searched the site but couldn't find anything relevant to this, my Laptop is about 15 months old.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Blencogo]

Hi nikonian,

Doesn't sound good as your external monitor is working OK and as the screen goes white immediately on power-on. It does sound like a connection problem or a fault with the inverter.

I suspect this will be a case for vaio-link support.

Can you get into the BIOS - it may be worth resetting the default settings. Have you looked at your monitors in Device Manager to see if any errors are reported? Have you tried booting in Safe Mode?

[nikonian]

Thanks for the reply,

I’m reluctant to alter any setting just yet, the external monitor I’m connected to only give me visuals inside windows, in other words I don’t see any of the boot process, this also means I’m unable to enter bios/safe mode etc, unless I re-start from within windows.

Matters are made worse as I’m fighting with a virus on my PC at the moment, and could have done with the laptop for assistance.

I was hoping someone would tell me I’ve been dumb and offer me an easy fix, However should this turn out to be a hardware issue, do you think Sony would help seeing as this is a very expensive 15months old laptop, surely this is NOT acceptable?

Regards

[tonybeard]

Something that serious I would reformat using the F8 recovery wizard and if you have and external monitor plug it in and do blenco's suggestions but generally save your documents to D drive and settings

[rich912]

Sad so say that this is almost certainly a hardware problem and no amount of re-installing will make a jot of difference.

As you can use an external monitor that rules out any video adapter problem and ‘white’ suggests that the inverter and backlight are working, which would point to something in the LCD processing, i.e. connections, or main board to LCD circuitry, not necessarily the LCD itself.

As you are outside the warranty period you will not receive a sympathetic hearing from Sony. I suggest that you contact an independent repairer.

[kee-lo_]

Agreed with Rich, could be a loose LCD>motherboard cable

[nikonian]

Spoke to Sony about this problem, they wanted £580 for starters.

I could screem, in 15 months I've hardly used this laptop, my kids use it perhaps twice a week for homework. As I said to the Sony Tech "I'll never buy another Sony" and I'll advise anyone else the same.

Overpriced..... I thought I was buying quality (wrong), so its just a £1500.00 disposable Laptop!

I'm now going to write to every newspaper, online review site and watchdog type program I can find, people need to hear about this.

Yes I could have bought the £600 Toshiba, but no I thought I'd buy quality, year right!!!!

Thanks for all your help, hope you never have an LCD problem

[stephanius]

Hmm, first off, from the techinical point of view, I would say this is most likely the display cable. It might be just have come lose on the mainboard and simple plugging it in may fix it. Graphics card and backlight are ok, so it could only be the cable, or the display's own electronics. If it is the later, the whole display needs to be replaced.

As I understand it, the type of the problem that the unit has determines how much up front payment Sony requests. Since the display and the mainboard are the two most expensive bits in the machine, it is quite logical that this would be a higher price than for example the keyboard.

Now, if it would be only the cable that needs plugging in, you will get your unit back and most of the money returned, if the display's electronics are faulty, you will just get the unit back.

[kee-lo_]

That would be daylight robbery to charge £500 for a cable!

[stephanius]

That would be daylight robbery to charge £500 for a cable!

The statement:
"That would be daylight robbery to charge £500 for ice cream!"
is about as irrelevant as the quoted one because Sony is not charging ridiculous prices for cables.

They ask for a an up-front payment based on the likely cost of a repair for the part in question, in this case the screen. If it is just the cable they will do a refund of most of that up-front payment.