Membery

I am having a problem with a Sony Vaio PCG-K15 laptop. When I try to turn it on it doesn’t boot. I can feel it “humming” but the screen is black. The screen is on, it’s just black. I reboot numerous times but no luck. The odd thing is that if I let it sit in this state “warming up” for about 20 minutes or so, I can reboot it and it comes up like normal.

After it is up and running (windows xp) it will do fine for a while and then sometimes it will lock up or flash a blue screen too quickly to read before rebooting again on its own. Sometimes it doesn’t do any of that after booting though. In the system information I get the message “Cannot access the Windows Management Instrumentation software. Windows Management files may be moved or missing.” When I close out of System information I get an Internet Explorer script error (line:60, Char:3, Error: Object required, Code:0, URL: hcp://system/sysinfo/msinfo.htm). My system restore is not working even thought it is enabled. The Direct X diagnostic says N/A for System manufacturer, System Model and BIOS.

If I power down and leave it off for more that 20 minutes or so, it will not come back up without letting it “warm up” again. I am thinking I have a BIOS problem, but the “warm up” symptom makes me think hardware issue. The reason I suspect BIOS is because this all started after a BIOS update – not immediately, but the following day.

The BIOS update didn’t go very well. The Phoenix updater instructed me to connect a USB floppy drive and not to remove the floppy until after the update was finished. The catch was that in the middle of the update the updater instructed me to remove the floppy. I was torn. I left it in anyway and when the laptop automatically rebooted it didn’t look at the floppy even though it was in the boot sequence before the hard drive. Nothing seemed to happen. I powered up and down a few times and all was well. The next day is when all of the above began.


Any insight?