I posted a while back in someone elses thread about problems with their all-in-one desktop VGC-JS1E. No responses to that so thought would provide an update and hope someone recognises the problem. My original post is below the update.
I have been experiencing random freezes of my machine while in Windows. If I try and turn it back on again after a hard power off it will generally refuse to boot and I'll be presented with just a power light and some running fans. Recently I have accessed the BIOS and lo and behold it froze while I was in there. This indicates a definite hardware, not software, issue. I have installed HWMonitor and the CPU temps are all fine. However, a sensor on the motherboard, "Mainboard #2", rises in temp over use. After leaving my computer off all today, when I got home I booted into Windows, loaded HWMonitor and took an initial reading of 63 degrees. Over the next hour this rose steadily to 85 whereupon I my machine "froze". When I say it froze, it didn't completely. An advert in an open webpage continued to cycle! However all input control was lost, and all hdd activity ceased - as per other lockups.
Sony has posted - for this exact model of computer - a known support FAQ about display problems found in BOTH the bios and in windows and states a repair may be needed. It sounds similar to the problems I have experienced.
And yet I have lived with this problem while it got worse as my first interaction with customer services suggested it was software. Now I'm out of warranty by a few months. Hardly seems fair, especially if this is a widely known problem. I would be very interested to hear from anyone at Sony or any other users who have experienced similar.
Also if anyone knows what "Mainboard #2" refers to (is it the GPU?) I'd like to hear it.
Original message posted in April:
I am having similar issues with my own VGC-JS1E which is also only 16 months old.
Several months ago the computer would once in a while randomly freeze. Notably, these freezes would be accompanied by a loss of power to USB devices (laser light on mouse off) and a complete suspension of activity by the hard-drive. A hard-power off was the only solution.
Over time, I have noticed this problem slowly getting more frequent. Interestingly, it also worsened - I found that if I tried to restart my machine immediately after once of these incidents then it would behave exactly as the original poster has described, the power light would come on, the fans would start up (at MAX speed, interestingly) but nothing further. If I left my machine turned off it would usually start-up after an hour or so. Just in the last few days the situation has deteriorated such that I can barely use my computer for any significant period of time - assuming it boots up - and it is fast becoming unusable.
Given the worsening of the problem, and the 'cool-down' period that seems to allow operations to continue, I wondered as to the possible cause. Could this be a CPU overheat? If so why does it frequently not even get as far as loading the bios, with the fans screaming just a few seconds after power on? Hard-disk problems? Ive not run checkdisk but theres no dodgy sound from the HDD and when the machine does boot up properly I can access files all fine. Power or USB problems? Windows Vista software or driver problems?
Im considering a clean install of Windows 7 to see if that helps?
Any insight would be most gratefully received, by myself, the OP and no doubt other owners of the VGC-JS1 who might be encountering similar issues any time soon...
All very disappointing for a computer just out of warranty!
