- 2nd October 2012: Bought at Sony Centre, Low Yat Plaza, Kuala Lumpur.
- June - September 2013: Right side hinge broke, damage repaired.
- 3rd - 5th October 2014: Left side hinge broke after more than a year of getting it repaired (conclusion: the hinge is SVE14A15FG's Achilles heel).
- 8th March 2015: Hard disk failure, data can no longer be accessed. Forgot to make recovery discs!
- 2nd May 2015: Bought new hard disk and reinstalled Windows 7 and required drivers; original bundled softwares (example: VAIO Gesture Control) cannot be installed as I forgot to make the recovery discs.
- 11th September 2015 - ongoing: VIDEO_TDR_ERROR caused by atikmpag.sys, causing the Blue Screen of Death to show up. More and more ridiculous errors, including MEMORY_MANAGEMENT, PAGE_FAULT_IN NONPAGED_AREA shows up after several reinstallations of drivers and software. Suspected either corrupt data in HDD (CHKDSK 'found no problems,' but System File Checker did found some corrupt data) or graphics card problem (cleaning / repair required). Uninstalled AMD's Catalyst Control Center, problem temporarily solved; problem reappears as I opened up Internet Explorer (I can't access Maxis Broadband's quota portal in Google Chrome). Disabled AMD Radeon 7670M Graphics should if I need to use the internet.
And that's all there is to write about the laptop's usage history.
RECOVERY DISC VS RECOVERY PARTITION: MY OPINION
In my personal opinion, I highly disliked the idea of placing recovery partition inside the hard disk, because you may not know when the hard disk would fail, sometimes without warning at all. And so, I strongly suggest all computer manufacturers out there to start reintroducing bundled recovery discs, which I believe to be much safer than placing the recovery partition inside the hard disk. Sure, blank DVD discs and USB flash drives are cheap nowadays, but some users tend to forget about it, with me included! Not my fault in the first place, as my laptop has NEVER suffered from severe system errors at all! (2nd October 2012 to 8th March 2015)
WHY I CHOOSE TO OWN A SONY VAIO
The reason why I choose to own a Sony VAIO is because of one thing: Adobe Photoshop Elements software. As far as I know, here in Malaysia, Sony is the only company that sells its computers bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements, and I loved using it ever since I first owned a Sony VAIO VGN-B66GP. Although I can actually buy Adobe Photoshop Elements at a computer store, it is priced between RM400 to RM600.
Imagine if I buy, say, an Acer laptop with similar or slightly better hardware specifications and without bundled Photoshop Elements, and adding Photoshop Elements on my shopping list. The result? It might cost more than a Sony laptop with bundled Adobe Photoshop Elements. Not only that, some of the bundled softwares included in some Sony laptops are not only EXPENSIVE, but also, DIFFICULT TO FIND in Malaysia (not sure whether this is true or not, but I believe it is truly difficult to find).
Will I buy another Sony VAIO? Yes, if it uses WINDOWS 7; because not only Windows 7 is already perfect enough, I also disliked the newer Windows operating systems, particularly Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 (don't ask me why, there are many others out there who disliked it too!).
Unfortunately, now that Sony no longer selling computers since 2014 (VAIO is now owned by Japan Industrial Partners while 5% of it is still owned by Sony; all VAIO computers are now sold in Japan only, but without the Sony logo), I might have no choice but to either buy a second-hand Sony laptop with Windows 7 or buy a computer without operating system and install Windows 7 on it, and lastly, buy Adobe Photoshop Elements software, as Photoshop CS4 is a bit complicated for me.
However, should if I decided to keep on using the laptop, I might have to send it for repairs at a laptop repair specialist that is not only cheap, but also effective. All that I need to do now is of the following:
- Buy the recovery discs (good thing that Sony is still selling them!).
- Buy a new hard drive (preferably an SSD), as using the current hard drive may cause the errors to reappear again.
- Send the laptop for hinge repair, GPU repair or motherboard cleaning (one source claimed that a dusty motherboard or GPU can cause atikmpag.sys error to show up) and thermal paste treatment (the processor had registered a sustained temperature of 94° Celcius more than once, sometimes causing the laptop to abruptly shut down during use due to overheating).
RemainUnknown522 Out.
