HELP PCV-V1

[Akanksha]

My dinosaur of a computer has finally thrown a strop and stopped working all together.

It does it's POST, does Plug and Play initialisation, then detects hard-drives etc and then doesn't do anything after that. It just stays still.
Although this issue had been happening over the last month after a couple of power on/offs, eventually it would come on . Except that on Wednesday I renewed my Norton Subscription and it updated the system and asked for a restart, after which it has stopped working altogether.

I have already taken a backup so I know I need to reformat my hard drive, but the trouble being that the on-system hard-drive (Matshita -810) stopped working a year ago. And although I had turned into Sony for repair, who apparently replaced it. It still didn't work after that, it doesn't even flash a light on power-up so I am guessing it's completely unusable. I had work to get on with so I just got an external CD-drive which has worked fine so far.

Now to use the recovery disc, I need a CD-rom but I can't see my external CD-ROM listed in the BIOS, does anyone have any idea of how to recover this system using an external CD-drive? In the BIOS, what settings need to be changed?

If anything, I actually have an ipod which could be used as an external hard-drive for rebooting? Does anyone know how to do that?

Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you

[Akanksha]

From their support website, although reading again I have been told that it could be higher than that.

I am trying to use a laptop to boot the system but in the meanwhile I have decided to take this matter seriously. I am thinking of reporting this to the consumer protection council

I have an apple ipod which I bought in America but I could get it repaired in the UK. They can support and so should Sony!

[kee-lo_]

From their support website, although reading again I have been told that it could be higher than that.

I am trying to use a laptop to boot the system but in the meanwhile I have decided to take this matter seriously. I am thinking of reporting this to the consumer protection council

I have an apple ipod which I bought in America but I could get it repaired in the UK. They can support and so should Sony!

Yeah I was going to say, they can charge you up to £1000 if they wanted, which I think is wrong as the mobo's probably only worth £140!

Go for it, I like to see people take the bull by the horns!

Hope you win

[Akanksha]

Actually Sony contacted me the other day and they have agreed to repairing my computer for FREE! Though I am not holding my breath on this because they did say that the repair will not be carried out if the machine was severely damaged - i don't quite understand what that means!

But for now, i am glad that my computer is going to repaired, in the meanwhile I have bought a toshiba notebook UA200 (vaio's are just tooo expensive!) do you know of a vaio notebook which is a reasonably good spec (dual core and stuff) and is about £800?

[kee-lo_]

Glad to hear you'll get it repaired.

Tosh's are not bad?

A good VAIO depends on what you want it to do, and really I'd wait until February when Vista is finally released.

[Akanksha]

Well this particular one is terribly noisy, the fan is completely on all the time and the machine is getting heated up. whereas when I look at my brother's sony laptop (enviously, ahem!) it doesnt make any sounds or anything!

And i dont think I want to wait until Feb I think that would be foolish given that windows doesn't have a good track record of getting it's OS rolling seamlessly first time around - I il give it a year before I move to Vista. Though I think the prices of Windows XP laptops would come down quite a bit by then, may be....?

And as for my computer, well I used to do a lot of mathetical stuff on it, what with my uni programme and stuff but now that I am in the working world (boooo!) all my computer does is check e-mails and browse the internet! Hehe.

[kee-lo_]

You'll be happy to know that a lot of laptop prices are falling to make way for Windows Vista, so it's a good moment to buy if you don't want to have Vista the day it's released (you're wise there LOL)

I have a feeling new VAIOs are coming out for Christmas too