Sony Vaio
 

Recently purchased this used Sony Vaio off ebay to replace the netbook for garage duties. The small screen of the netbook would often obscure many of the graphs I use for tuning of fuel injection tables and the 17" screen of the Vaio will be a welcome addition.

The new (to me) laptop is probably overkill for it's intended purpose, but for $200 I could see no wrong. It sports a C2D T7200 @ 2.00 GHz and 3 GB of memory. Came with Vista installed and seemed to work well without a hitch, but I really wanted XP for my uses. I made two recovery disc's of the original before beginning the XP install.

Several attempts of an install of Tiny XP were successful until it came time to boot from the hdd...it would then go to black screen. I had a legit copy of Vista 64 bit on hand and tried it with the same results. Even the recovery disks refused to cooperate. Finally I tried Tiny 7 which installed normally and booted right up and is currently running. Any idea's on what the problem might be? I still would rather be using XP.

http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/q...onyVaio001.jpg

http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/q...onyVaio002.jpg

http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/q...onyVaio003.jpg

http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/q...onyVaio004.jpg

http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/q...onyVaio005.jpg

was it on IDE or AHCI

I have to think it would be on IDE though?

Controller drivers loaded ?

That's the problem with lappy's hard to tear down and trouble shoot properly

Could be the drive is in and out on it's last leg ???

So the install process of xp went normal but on reboot nothing?

I'd have to suspect you need the chipset drivers and such for the lappy components. Seven pretty much has all that stuff pre-loaded in the os.

Limited options in bios WD...was working fine before with Vista and now with Tiny 7. Kind of hate to mess with it again until I have another idea.

:blush:


http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/q...onyVaio006.jpg

http://i434.photobucket.com/albums/q...onyVaio007.jpg

Yeah, that's just about it. You would think a OEM Vista disc would have everything needed...maybe not. Laptops suck. :thumbdown:

They can be difficult, especially when the oem deems their drivers to be proprietary and don't list them for download on their website. DELL used to give me grief but at least they had their chipset/video drivers available for download.

Not sure bout sony but maybe they have theirs available for download somewhere, other than that u'd need the install cd's that came with the lappy. :thumbdown:

I may be wrong but for some of the Vista based computers you can't get some of the drivers for XP. I have a Gateway and a HP that's like that... end up installing 7/64 instead

Still doesnt explain why the Vista would not work. :Dizzy:

LoL I think theres an xp slip stream thread around here somewhere. Slips the drivers onto the xp install disk before hand somethin like that. Google slipstreaming xp.