laptop.....dead :0(

[3littlewomen]

My sony viao laptop - that has being abused, much used (and sat on by cats) has decided to go into a coma.....

Freezing of the screen, forced it into shut down in the end by removing battery and disconecting power (nothing else would work... but feel free to slap my very un-techie wrists). It trys to come back to life - but whilst opening the windows screen - cannot get the yoke on the screen to move...

Lovely knowledgeable ladies (even men).... help

First up viao are well known for overheating, it's because they are too thin to sustain decent cooling.

So it might have killed itself from heat, or the ram could be buggered.

Imho there are only a few things you can do as a tech challenged person.

download a free os such as linux on a live cd, get the laptop to boot from the cd you might have to tell it to in the bios which is a control thing for the motherboard that kicks in before the os you have to hold down buttons as the laptop is turned on to access it.

If the live disc works perfectly fine then the hard drive is at fault, could be fucked or could be windows that's fucked, some linux will be able to take files from the drive and transfer them to a usb but you must virus check them before copying them to any windows machine.

Then you'd have to install a new os on the hd

many thanks for that Sun.... reckon its fecked!! Of course overheating never helped by the big fat cat that sits on it!!

what do i replace it with?? Is there a brand of laptop that has a good rep?

3littlewomen - There's nothing you've described that suggest that "it's fecked!!" Don't give up without diagnosing unless you want it to be dead so that you can justify a shiny new one?

Did you even try the Linux cd test that SunWukong suggested? If it works fine while running (for example) Ubuntu from the cd, that points to your hard drive being at fault and it may not even need replacing. It could be minor OS corruption rather than any physical deterioration and be correctable via a simple chkdsk.