AR11M on Vista Ultimate - screen gone dead

[hidesil]

I upgraded my VAIO VGN-AR11M to Vista Ultimate some months ago, and put memory up to 2Gb, and everything worked fine. But now when I turn on the laptop I can hear it starting but the screen is blank. I tried these:
I connected to external monitor and no signal seems to be going out.
I put the original Sony (Samsung) memory back in and still no joy.

Is there something else I should try?
Thanks for any help and prayers.
Hiran

[Blencogo]

Hi Hiran,

It sounds like the video chip or driver have a fault.

Try booting your Vaio in Safe Mode (tap F8 when you turn the Vaio on and select Safe Mode from the menu). This should boot using a default VGA screen driver at 640 X 480.

Does the screen work? If it does, have a look in Device Manager in Display Adapters and see if you have the nVidia chip installed properly. Try installing a new video driver for the nVidia GeForce Go 7600.
When you had an external screen attached, did you press F7 to toggle between Vaio screen and external screen?
If the screen does not work, look at it closely. Can you see the LCD image with no backlight?

Are you still within the Warranty period?

[hidesil]

Hi Blencogo,

A miracle happened, so thanks for all your prayers!

I was about to press F8, or already did, and the laptop fired up as it should. I don't know exactly what caused the glitch - my suspicion is that the memory chips became slightly unsited as I moved the laptop to another office this morning. On changing the chips around and pushing them in firmly my problem was solved.

Thanks Blencogo.

Hiran

[Blencogo]

A Miracle

That is good news Hiran.

[Dekesh]

on a slightly different note, how is vista ultimate running on ur AR11M as I have the same model and am thinking whether or not to upgrade to vista ultimate

[hidesil]

Hi Dekesh,
To be safe I put Vista Ultimate on a second partition (July '07), thus leaving XP Pro as the primary partition. I got almost all the hardware working via new drivers from the VAIO site, except the memory stick reader (but I must try again).

I will be re-installing Vista as my primary partition soon as I'm happy I won't need to go back to XP.