Sony Vaio VPCEC1S1E issues

Hi from a Newbie

I have a neighbour who Im trying to help with a 17" Sony Vaio VPCEC1S1E thats developed some issues. Its only 18 months old but sadly out of warranty. Its running Windows 7 Home Premium.

Im not sure if its a hardware fault or software.

The main issues are that occasionally the screen goes black but the mouse is still there flickering on the black screen. If you CTRL ALT DEL it briefly brings up the task manager for a second then goes black again. Same if you put it to sleep. when you wake it it briefly displays the desktop icons then goes black. the only way out of this is to power it down and restart. then it may be ok for a few hours.

Also occasionally when there is hardly anything running it brings up an error message when trying to open a file such as a spreadsheet stating there are insufficent resources to complete the task.

Its really slow on boot up, takes four minutes.

We spoke to the Sony out of warranty help line yesterday who sent me a link for the lastest Graphics driver and BIOS updates. These have been installed and the problem persists.

Ive run all the Sony Diagnostics for hardware faults and they come up ok.

Im guessing its a software problem but I just dont know for sure. The laptop has lots of programs, data and devices installed and it would be a huge task to factory reset and probably a days work which may or may not resolve the problem.

Is there any way on this machine of performing a repair without wiping it or should we just bite the bullet at go for a full recovery?

System Restore doesnt work either. Just says unable to restore.

Any suggestions appreciated

 

Has it been checked for malware infections recently using a good, updated antivirus program?

 

Well I have downloaded Malware Bytes and run a scan with that but I suppose its worth doing a full deep scan rather than the standard one?

It has an up to date Avast AV on it. I do wonder if something has slipped in though.

thanks for the reply

 

You're welcome.

Yes, I would recommend a full scan to make sure its scanning all of the files and folders etc. Also, make sure the most recent update has been downloaded.

 

Well we seem to have got rid of the black screen but it is now giving the following error every few hours when trying to open the documents folder (or any folder for that matter)

C:\users\bryan\documents is not accesible insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service

I ran a full malware bytes scan and avast scan and nothing came up.

When this error occurs if you check the task manager the computers memory appears to be almost full. Programs will load slowly but the only thing to do is reboot. Seems like some program or other has a memory leek.

Its confusing!

 

What does task manager say is using up all the memory? If you could post a screenshot that'd be handy.

Also can you check no-one disabled the pagefile?

 

Thanks for the reply

Ive just come back from my neighbours. We removed Avast and put on AVG and also took out of start up a recent update for some screen drivers based on the fact that its since this update that the problem started.

Going to see how it goes today and if it doesnt work will post some screen shots

Thanks again