[octony5]

A Sony Vaio PCG-k27 laptop. After using it fine for years suddenly the screen went haywire. Everything smeared into horizontal lines. Could not see anything or do anything from there. The computer was then hooked up to and external monitor and that monitor worked fine. When the computer was restarted in safe mode the laptop monitor worked fine to display safe mode options but when windows begins to open the same problem occurs. As windows finishes booting an error occurs saying that the ati driver is nonexistent or not working properly. Device manager says its working fine.

Then I went to work on this thing. Started by checking for updates and running virus scan an spyware removal tools. Then defragmented and ran disc cleanup. All went well but screen still not working.

Started to look online for help and came across a site that explained how to disable the driver. I did that. Now the monitor is blank after intial windows start screen appears. Safe mode will not even open. Computer freezes after selecting how I want to start and what system to use. It goes through the list of drivers and such then freezes.

I obviously shouldn't have disabaled the monitor driver. How can I get at least this part fixed again? Any sugguestions on a complete fix for this laptop would be appreciated.

Thank you.

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all else aside, I suspect the problem here is hardware, not software. Laptops are notorious for fried video chips due to heat buildup. The first part of your problem sounds like this

A laptop lcd will sometimes work partially (ie, in the non graphic portion of startup, but not in the graphic portion), because there are multiple parts of the graphic chip responsible for projecting an image on your screen.

That said, the best way to find out is to reinstall Windows from scratch. I really wouldn't monkey around with it other than to try a complete reinstall.

[gerryf]

all else aside, I suspect the problem here is hardware, not software. Laptops are notorious for fried video chips due to heat buildup. The first part of your problem sounds like this

A laptop lcd will sometimes work partially (ie, in the non graphic portion of startup, but not in the graphic portion), because there are multiple parts of the graphic chip responsible for projecting an image on your screen.

That said, the best way to find out is to reinstall Windows from scratch. I really wouldn't monkey around with it other than to try a complete reinstall.

[octony5]

If I do that I will lose the files on the computer right? That would suck. Is there a way to re-enable the VGA driver? Currently I am getting nothing because I disabled that driver thinking that the other driver would then be reapplied. I was wrong. If I could get the external monitor up again I could save the stuff I need then try a reinstal.