viao FW trouble - help appreciated!

[NickJ100]

Hi,

I'm hoping for some advice:
My new Sony Vaio FW (VGN-FW5) arrived on Monday (26/7/10) this week. My son was playing on it (browser based game), and it locked up with a black screen. He had been playing the game earlier in the morning too with no problem.

I modified the 'power management', to eliminate the possibility that this was due to a power down, or sleep/hibernate behaviour. Unfortunately, the same thing happened yesterday too. No keys respond, and the only way to restore the display is to turn it off and on. Of course it then complains that the system did not shut down properly.

I am not able to replicate the problem, so it seems intermittent. Does anyone have any similar experience or suggestions as to what may be the cause? Or should I just return it now and go buy something else?

thanks for any tips!

[itbroker]

Welcome to ClubVaio NickJ100,

I do believe that the problem (maybe) had been caused by the game itself. Swapping memory pages or wrong memory management can lead to a "freeze" situation as you describe. At soon you can not replicate the problem, What's necessary to do is pay attention about daily basis...

Some questions...

- Can you verify the minimal requirements to play the game on-line and OS compatibility ?
- Do you have other software's running in the same time as you son is playing ?
- Do you try to check in the Game web page/forums if other users are complaining about the
same issue ?
- Have you downloaded the up-to-date drivers available through VAIO Update ?

Please, report any other issue regarding your laptop here. I will be watching the thread to help you when necessary.

[NickJ100]

Thanks very much for the suggestions itbroker!

In answer to some of your questions:

-minimum requirements are greatly exceeded by the laptop
-there is no other software running when my son is playing
-I have run windows and viao update (I saw win do an update, and I think viao is set to auto download...need to check)
- On the game forums - I did try and look, but most games are littered with complaints of crashing. I will ask my kids which forums they use, and look there..

I had a tech support email yesterday. So I did a full hardware diagnostic (no errors), and a c drive restore (I have only had the laptop 2 days, and installed absolutely nothing yet). The whole process wiped out my evening completely ;(

I have told the children to test the laptop again today, so I will cross my fingers. I looked in my event log before restore, and it was full of warning s and errors...1 MB worth ...
I'll need to find a work round for their game if that is indeed the issue, since it was a major factor in us buying a laptop in the first place (so they can play together).

Will update tomorrow. Thank you again for helping me!

[NickJ100]

Just to update - the diagnostics found no hardware problems. The restoration of the c drive (which was quite cool really) seems to have done the trick, at least during the limited 'testing' that my kids have done so far. We were away at the weekend though, so hopefully nothing comes up.

Thanks for the help - I will reawaken this thread if anything reoccurs,

cheers

NJ

Ps I should probably recheck the event log... not sure how big a file I should expect..