Help fix a free Sony Vaio

[Lt. Dan]

Well, just as the title says. I have come across a Sony Vaio VGC-V517G for free and it looked like it was going to run just fine. The system itself was given to my old roommate without the wireless keyboard, mouse, or remote. Now, the first time I booted it up, it worked just fine, and it looked like it was hardly used at all. Almost all the harddrive space was free and it looked like it had all the standard, just bought, pre installed software on it.

Now that I have been playing with it for a while, I tried going into the properties to see if I could change up the desktop and the screen went out. Im wondering if I should pop in my XP disk to reinstall or what. I know its a TV/PC kinda thing and was thinking that it maybe trying to display from another input, because when I turn it on, the fan kicks on, the lights blink, and the LCD backlight turns on too, it just won't visably boot. But without the remote, it's hard to tell if that's it or not. And when I try the system recovery disk, it still will not display anything.

Any kind of help or ideas would be great. This would be an improvment in computing for me, so I would like to make it work. Thanks to those who know more than I.

[Joviwan]

Does A) The laptop have a VGA/DVI output, and B) do you have a VGA/DVI monitor? If so, plug it in and see what happens. Generally speaking, laptops will choose an external monitor if it's available on boot-up rather than it's own. From there, it should be easier to figure out what the problem is. My guess is the laptop screen broke somehow, but I wouldn't rule out Random Hardware Failure having nuked something else inside.

Otherwise, there's little we can do aside from speculation. Take it to a repair shop?

[Lt. Dan]

Well, the screen gives life for a split second with a _ like it wants to boot and then pops onto a black screen, so I have the impression that it didn't die. When it did boot the first few times I tried it, it had the same underscore and then typed out something too quick to read. After that it would read the Vaio screen and booted windows xp like any other system. And it isn't a laptop, it's one of those all-in-one desktops that is supposed to be for home entertainment systems and I'm pretty sure that it came with a remote originally. So I'm wondering if it has different sources that could be changed via remote or keyboard. But I never used one before so that's just a guess. No other output than a S-Video and I tried that out to see, but my tv didn't see the signal. But I never would have thought of that, so thanks for the suggestion.

And if nothing else, I may just have to bite the bullet and take it in. I guess it's not as bad as buying one. Sony is fucking expensive.

[Joviwan]

Goodness, that's hideously embarrassing. I read Vaio and just assumed it was a laptop.

What it sounds like to me, then, is that you might have changed the resolution to something the monitor can't actually support, and the change stuck, for whatever reason. Can you boot into safe mode?