Laptop is banjaxed…

About 15 months ago I purchased a lovely Sony Vaio VGN-FZ21Z Laptop.  It was my pride and joy and from that moment on I must have spent at least six hours a day looking at it.  It had a year warranty which expired just three months ago and like clockwork, it started giving me gyp.  I am unable to bring it back to the shop now so I would like to diagnose whether it is a hardware or software issue so I can decide what to do next.

I have the CD which enables me to revert it to its factory settings, I don’t want to have to take this route as I will have to re-install all of my programs etc.

Another option would be to buy a hard drive and swap it with the one I have in my laptop, which would determine if it was a hard drive issue immediately and I wouldn’t run the risk of losing all my programs.

However, something tells me it is not a hard drive issue as there has been no freezing or crashing and everything is fully functional.

Here are the symptoms:

My laptop has major graphics distortion.  Multi coloured Zig-zags, stripes, patterns, fuzzy lines are displayed and the resolution has been altered also, so everything is massive!  I try to get the resolution back to normal but it completely ignores my command.  I shut it down & restart it but it doesn’t change a thing…

If I switch it off using the off button and then turn it on again, this sometimes brings it back to normal.  It is working perfectly at the moment; I don’t expect it will stay that way for long though.  In the good ole days, this is what my normal login screen looked like…

And now look at it!

Honestly, this is really traumatic! I feel like I am about to lose a limb…

Last night after tinkering with it and trying to bring it back from it’s serious illness, I kinda felt like I was ill too…

Here are some other shots of it acting completely mental.  I don’t know why it is doing this to me, we were such buds.

What the hell is this all about:

And this carry on:

Snowdrops!

And now it’s giving me lip and being all uncooperative about stuff:

And why is it enlarging it’s text so much, like it thinks I am half blind or something.

So I went out last night in a panic and bought an external hard drive and copied everything over to it.

I then deleted everything from my Laptop.  I am running Cyberscrub Privacy Suite right now which erases previously deleted files beyond recovery.  I am doing this in case i have to hand it into the Laptop hospital to have an operation (I have turned into a psycho-paranoid freak when it comes to data).

It came with 2GB of Ram but I upgraded it to 4GB, even though it is unable to utilise the full 4GB.  I think it can only use up to 3GB or something like that.

It has a built in graphics card which I am told is built into the motherboard.  I am inclined to think it may be a graphics card corruption or something, but who knows?  After I have wiped my entire laptop I am going to revert it to factory settings, so if you don’t hear from me, it means it completely ruined it altogether and I have been blown out of cyber space entirely.

Goodbye Cruel CyberWorld…