Sony vaio- not coming on

pacman_2

My Sony laptop doesn't come on. Press the start button, the green light comes on, whiring sound but nothing on screen. It's 4 yrs old and a couple of years ago had a sony service . Is the screen gone? Or is it something terminal? Help please

Fightsback

Take the battery out, unplug from the mains and hold the power on button down for about 10-15 seconds. Put the battery back in and re-plug into the mains then switch on as normal and see what happens.

pacman_2

Nope. That didn't work. Someone said could be hard disk problem.

pacman_2

Done some reading. It was in sleep mode. Could it be that it I struggling to restart after being in sleep mode. Any ideas on how to start it from here? I've tried turning it off and on again.

Fightsback

What is the exact model of Sony and does it have a AMD or Nvidia graphics chip ?

pacman_2

Model is VPCEE3EOE, got a sticker AMD vision.

Fightsback

pacman wrote: »

Model is VPCEE3EOE, got a sticker AMD vision.

Try plugging it in to an external monitor to eliminate a screen failure, however I doubt something like changing the CMOS battery will work either. To check the HDD, plug it into another machine (or caddy) to test but I suspect you'll find it's OK and this way you can also rescue any data.

I fear that you may have a GPU failure, that chipset is a bit notorious for it, the athlon P series / HD radeon combo.

There is a temporary trick (the towel method) that you can do that sometimes works to get the laptop GPU to fire up is to cover the air vent to warm up the GPU but don't let it get too hot then reboot, however this does carry a tiny element of risk cooking chips if you let it get too hot.

The cause is either weak solder joints holding the chip down or alternative theories suggest a flaw in the GPU die mounting itself. This is an expensive fix to do it properly and uneconomical for that laptop; beware cowboy re-flowers.

Good luck.

pacman_2

went to local repair shop-eventually. They've had a look at it and say it's the motherboard. they're going to find out how much it will cost. Any ideas roughly? just want to make sure I don't get ripped off.