Sony coughs to faulty Vaio notebooks
Dud Nvidia GPUs to blame
Sony has admitted that faulty Nvidia graphics chips are causing havoc for some Vaio laptop owners.
The Japanese electronics giant said the problem dates back to July 2008, when Nvidia announced that some notebooks fitted with unspecified versions of its graphics processors were “failing in the field at a higher than normal rate”.
It has taken until now for Sony to determine that a “very small percentage” of Vaios fitted with the Nvidia GPUs may experience "distorted video, duplicate images or a blank screen".
The problems affect nine US Vaio models in all, Sony said, including the AR-, FZ- and LT-series machines. In the UK, coverage extends beyond those three to the C1, C2, LM and LT Vaios.
Sony promised to correct the problem for free. It will cover the cost of a parts and labour repair and, in addition to the standard limited 12-month warranty, will provide repaired machines with a three-year warranty extension for the GPU.
You’re eligible for a free GPU-related repair even if your laptop's warranty has expired.
More information about the problem – and details on how to get your machine repaired – are available online from Sony US. The UK pages can be found here, logging in and doing a search for 'nvidia'. ®
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COMMENTS
not only sony..
hi,
not sure if you know this, but the TX line of HP's tablet pc's have an annoying habit of dying just after the years guarantee is up? (my TX1340EA went after about 19 months)..
from what i can gather, it's a design fault, inasmuch as the heatsink doesn't sit tightly enough on the gpu, so over time, it heats up so much that it loosens the solder around it and yer graphics go..
also, somewhat bizarrly, just prior to this yer wireless goes kaput as well..
atm, HP are not taking ownership of this problem and it's making a lot of people mad!
check the online petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?deadhptx&1
if you click on the view signatures at the bottom, you can see some peoples comments..lot's of fuming customers!
cheers,
bill
p.s. avid DAILY reg reader :D
well...
Sony is just the windows version of crApple... Over Priced Under Powered and short lived.
re: Sony took it's time
In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a failure associated with some of their graphics processors (GPU) due to a manufacturing defect in the graphics chip packaging. At that time Sony and NVIDIA jointly investigated whether VAIO models equipped with this GPU were impacted by this issue. This investigation revealed that the issue had not occurred in such VAIO models.
However, after closely monitoring the situation, Sony has now determined that a very small percentage of VAIO computers with the NVIDIA graphics chips may be affected.
These PCs may exhibit distorted video, random characters or a blank screen due to a failure of the NVIDIA graphics chip.
Resolution
As a part of our commitment to quality, for any customer who requires repair of their VAIO computer due to the NVIDIA graphics processor issue, Sony will cover the cost of repair (parts and labor) at no charge during the first four years following the date of purchase of the models in question (see list below).
In case your model is shown in the list below, we invite you to contact VAIO Support to arrange service for your VAIO.
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