I normally expect a Vaio to be a nice, slim, ultraportable… but not this one!

It was big, heavy, wedge-shaped, and running an inefficient pentium4 as well!

Anyway, the customer said it suddenly stopped working correctly, so she decided to reinstall XP using the recovery CD.

The recovery would get part way through, and then say it had an error reading the disk…

I must say I’ve never seen a factory CD develop a fault before… but there is always a first time.

I take it to my office, and run some bart-pe utilities… but has problems booting the CD.

It gets part way through, and then just stops.

I figure: its time to do a RAM test.

And sure enough, it detects a fault in one of the two sticks of 256MB SODIMMS

Customer agrees to replace it with a 512MB stick… giving a total of 768 MB… but I only have 1 supplier who has the RAM in stock.

And of course, as soon as I get there, its sold out. He does have a 256Mb stick, and a 1024MB stick.

I try the 1024MB module, and it half works (it only shows 512MB)… A bit expensive… and more than I quoted the customer. I still don’t understand why laptop makers limit laptop RAM in this way!

I try the 256Mb module, and it works.

So I decide to go with 256MB, as the customer is no worse off, she gets a price discount, and she was happy with the laptops performance beforehand anyway.

I just found the model naming confusing for a while… I usually look for model numbers under most laptops, as thats where the real model number is.

But with this vaio, the number under the laptop (PCG-9R2P) gave very few google hits.

However, the number just above the keyboard (PCG-K7P6) gave me lots of results, and allowed me to track down the correct RAM module.