Endless Paradigm

Okay so got a mates laptop to have a look at, it's pretty much annoying me now.
So its a Vaio with Vista Home Premium, which i did a clean install of cause it was screwed.

I can't get the WLAN card to work or turn on. After endless searching for a decent driver download, it says windows cannot load the drivers (in device manager). when i actually switch on the wireless card with the switch on the laptop itself, the LED next to the the 'ON' sign does not come on..

secondly, the screen keeps randomly going blank. i don't mean black or BSOD, it just seems to go the same colour as the background at that time, and no buttons do anything etc, so i have to do a force shutdown every time. I had a little peek inside and couldn't see anything out of place etc, but who knows. Tried doing the static removal thing, no luck. Also have installed latest graphics drivers so i don't think its the Graphics card.

Any help is much appreciated, thanks.

Which VAIO is it?

I have a VAIO and know they are a bitch to get drivers for.

VGN-NS10L

Indeed they are, at least some one else knows the pain. This is not the first VAIO I've had issues with, my sister has one, and have done a couple of repairs as well, jeez they're a pain in the beeeehind

http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/va..._S&l=en_GB

their site is notoriously slow on the driver sections though

Sounds like Sony didn't really think this through.
"Hey, let's release a really driver-picky computer, and then have a slow-as-balls drivers section!"

okay.. so i stay away from vaio's ..

The screen going blank bit sounds like a hardware issue. How warm is it getting? Install SpeedFan to monitor the temperatures. If it's getting cozy, especially the graphics then I'm guessing that's th problem. Either that or it's just dying.

cool stuff. I'll remember that in case my laptop blows up

Silvertie Wrote: [ -> ]Sounds like Sony didn't really think this through.
"Hey, let's release a really driver-picky computer, and then have a slow-as-balls drivers section!"

Dell aren't much better. Models I have to work with released only 3-4 years ago have driver pages linking to files that aren't on their server anymore - 404.

most of the time it doesn't even get anywhere near warm anyway due to the screen blanking out, so i don't think it's an overheating issue to be honest. I might have another check and see if the ribbon/cable is loose etc.