I've had my Vaio VGN-FZ11L laptop for a few days now, and restarted it this evening in order to complete installation of a program and something very weird has happened. The screen comes on, and the BIOS loading screen appears quickly, but ournd the edges of where it says "VAIO" etc there is a flickering "fuzz". Then Vista tries to load, but fails; when I go into recovery options, this flickering fuzz is still there.

Because the fuzz turns up as soon as the BIOS boot screen appears, my instinct is that it's a hardware problem. But this is really weird, as the problem didn't start after I'd dropped the laptop - it had just been restarted, and was working fine before it was restarted.

<edit>The "fuzz" looks exactly like a wrong video driver or resolution has been used in Windows - that's where I've seen it before, at least. The weird thing is that the fuzz appears when teh BIOS screen loads up, when I wouldn't expect a graphics driver to be loaded at all. I'm now running some system diagnostic utils on the Sony backup disks, and as well as the fuzz the screen looks like it's at a funny resolution - but this might be just because the screen defaults to a funny resolution when using the system tools</edit>

Anyone got any ideas?

--Jim

Hi Jim,

Your absolutely right, in that BIOS does not require any drivers. If your experiencing graphical problems whilst in BIOS, this is without any question of doubt - a hardware problem.

It may simply be (and with any luck) the small cable that goes between the laptop motherboard and the screen itself is loose. I would recommend if your unsure about taking the laptop apart, to take it in for repair, as there is normally quite a bit you will need to take apart to get to these connections.

It's weird that this happened on a reboot though, isn't it? I mean, nothing happened to the laptop which could have effected the hardward, as far as I can tell. Thanks for the tip though - I'll get on to the supplier and get them to sort it...

'tis a little bit co-incidental, but talking of cables, you'll never believe how many customers have said to me when I asked the question "Are you sure the cable is plugged in?", customer responds: "Well nothing has changed or moved, I can't see it being the cable", and then later find the plug hanging out of the socket.

Do you think it could be anything more serious than a loose cable? It's just that I have to go away tomorrow so couldn't send the laptop off in time to be repaired, and would be without it for at least a fortnight. If you reckon it is probably just a cable I might check it out myself...

It's possible that the problem may be more serious than a loose cable. If you have an external monitor you could try on the laptop to see if it works, it would at least make an onboard graphics problem unlikely, but if it's still under warranty, your best to send the latop for repair. If there are any signs of physical damage, they can often find this as an excuse to void any repair.