Laptop

[nibbler]

Brother's laptop not responding - won't turn on. Have checked that RAM is seated properly as that's about the only thing I know how to do. He said that when he turned it off it made a sparky/metallic sound and now it r dead. Any ideas?
It's a Sony Vaio laptop which is out of warranty.

[killie99]

when you plug in the charger into the wall socket does the charger LED come on? Assuming it does, do any LEDs come on when you plug the charger into the laptop?

[nibbler]

The LED on the laptop or the PSU brick?

[Guy]

Wont turn on at all? Any of the various LEDS active?

[nibbler]

Wasn't turning on at all earlier, just now it turned on but went off immediately when I took out the power cable. I reckon battery is dead. Weird that it fizzled out earlier and wasn't responding. Oh well, thanks guys!

[Guy]

Try removing the battery completely, plugging in the power cable and try powering it up? It should work without the battery off the mains.

[nibbler]

Yeah it seems to be bypassing the battery at the moment, as the battery won't charge I think and it powers down very quickly once I remove the cable. Weird that just under 2 years' use the battery would go?

[this_is_gav]

Batteries don't tend to just stop working normally - they lose charge quicker and quicker until they won't hold anything meaningful before they die.

Yours suggests it's a faulty battery rather than a one at the end of it's life. The odd bit is that it's lasted 2 years before it just stopped working - basic electronics like that tend to either die quickly or have a reasonable life.

[nibbler]

And now it's back to normal. Very strange. TBH this sony laptop has had lots of issues, wifi broke and so did the headphone jacks.

[this_is_gav]

Oh, one tip which has worked on a couple of recent portables. It won't fix batteries at the end of their natural life, but on suffering this with a few Acer Aspire Ones (the original bog-standard Acer netbook) I read a few reports of this issue where flashing the latest BIOS 'fixed' this... sure enough, on the half dozen of ours which were affected by this, flashing the BIOS worked. Don't ask... I don't know how flashing a BIOS can kick a battery up the arse either. The cynic in me suggests it was programmed in (hence why they 'died' around the same time) to get you to splash a little more money a year or 2 down the line for either a new battery or a replacement netbook, and that may have worked if the original Acer Aspire One (the one with the horribly slow 8GB SSD) wasn't the worst system I've ever had the misfortune of using, and as a result Acer realised you wouldn't ever spend another penny on it, so released a 'fix'.

Now I realise Sony are about as likely to release an updated BIOS as the moon is to be populated by trumpet-playing Lurpak guys, but it's worth looking, and if such an update exists, it's certainly worth a go if the laptop has a relapse.