Quote Originally Posted by bdeli
Quote Originally Posted by Stephen
Have you tried just failsafe at the boot: prompt it will boot with minimal hardware checking.
Failsafe does not work. In the meantime I did manage to get an installation of Mandrake 9.1 working by disabling apm & hlt during the setup process (linux apm=off no-hlt).

From the research I have done so far it seems that most PCG-F series laptops are plagued with this problem and it is not just Sony which lies at fault - it seems that the processors used by Intel are defective. More info here: http://pub173.ezboard.com/funofficia...icID=818.topic
Thank you for posting this. My wife bought a VAIO laptop (on my recommendation, I'm afraid) with an Athlon XP processor (VAIO model PCG-FXA47, IIRC), that suffers the same problem in WinXP. Haven't tried it with any version of linux yet. I did a comprehensive reformat and reinstall of OS, software and drivers, but problem still persists. Consequently, I had to give up an HP desktop to her so that she could get her work done, and I was going to use the VAIO as a testbed for a Mandrake install (for learning, not to solve the problem, necessarily).

One of the things I've noticed, interestingly, is that the problem seemed to manifest itself when the laptop was connected to an ethernet WinXP p2p network. I've run the box separate from the network without incident. I tried turning off the power management settings, with no effect.

BTW, as I was checking the Sony website to verify the model number, I ran across a BIOS upgrade (for my wife's laptop, anyway) that corrects a freezing condition associated with the SP1 patch for WinXP. Come to think of it, the problem started right about the time that SP1 came out (I remember having a devil of a time getting it installed). I'm going to check it out, and I thought you might want to as well. YMMV.