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About 4 months ago my prized vaio laptop developed a problem which rendered it useless to me. Suddenly when I pressed the start button the BIOS splash screen or whatever you call it, lol, had strips of red lines consisting of red dots running through it vertically. Then when it started, right before the vista logo would pop up, the screen would just go blank and it seemed as though windows was running but I had no GUI. What a bummer. I tried to restore it but it still had the same issue so I ended up getting a newer computer and set this one aside for future education. Recently, I dusted it off, got out the restore disks I created when it was new and started to boot up to my external CD/DVD drive. I tried complete restore several times and had the same problem but I kept trying to do a complete restore. Erased the disc with 0's twice still the same issue. There are 2 hard drives in this computer so I took out them and switched them just to see what would happen. I had 2, 2GB RAM cards in it which I had bought to upgrade the RAM so I put the originals back in, just to see what happens, lol. I finally got a good restore and started to remove Norton 360, Live Update, etc. etc. and started the Windows Update which seemed to go fine up until Service Pack 1, lol, when bammmmm the dreaded vertical red dot stripes on the BIOS screen again, back to square 1. Make a long story short, I didn't give up and it's now a good running, back to original Vaio AR630E. I never had to buy any hardware for this laptop yet and it's still going strong, lol. Moral of the story is, "Give it a break but don't give it up". P.S.: In case your thinking it, I don't believe in Jinx's, lol.