Vaio Crashing and not Rebooting

[billcole]

Hi I have a Vaio NW20EF that I bought for my son last Christmas which has developed a problem. It will randomly crash and then won't reboot. The Startup diagnotics run and say that the operating system can't be found. It can't fix the problem itself. Going to the Command prompt at running bootrec.exe/FixMBR gets the machine going again, but it doesn't run for more than an hour or so before doing it again. Running the variuos diagnostics reports that the Memory, the processor and the Hard Drive are all OK, and a full scan with Kaspersky Internet Security find no viruses.

As it was a Christmas present last year it is now a few days out of warranty of course. Any suggestions as to what it might be would be most welcome...there haven't been any recent Windows Updates that have caused problems have there ?

I haven't yet done a complete retore from the Rescue Disk set yet as there's a lot of files to be saved elsewhere first, but I guess that may be worth trying.

Any idea if Sony might stretch the Warranty for me ? We bought the machine on 12th Dec 2009, and it wasn't used until 25th Dec 2009. First of these crashes was on 16th Dec 2010.

Thanks for any advice

[peshyxp]

Save all your documents and then do a full system recovery using the recovery discs you should have created

If problem persists after full recovery then it is most likely a hardware issue and will need trial and error to identify what precise issue is

Dont waste time going through all diagnostic tests that take ages and nine times out of ten dont resolve anything

Full recovery is your best and quickest solution in determining the fault

Keep us updated on how you get on