Friday, December 25, 2009

Either VAIO VPCCW1FFX/L lasts one month or I got a lemon

I'm publishing this here just in case Sony decides to censor me and as a placeholder on where to continue troubleshooting later.

Pros: 4GB of RAM, discrete video card, looks purple
Cons: HD seems to be faulting after just 3 weeks, no recovery CD/DVD
Review: I saw this one at the Sony store on Las Americas outlet in San Diego and immediately snatched one as its blue color looks purple, it had an NVIDIA discrete card and plenty of RAM.
I happily used the computer for about 3 weeks with no hiccups and was rather happy with it.
Then this morning I was greeted with an un-bootable system, "UNMOUNTABLE _BOOT_VOLUME" BSOD over and over.
I called support and spend well over an hour punching F2, F8 and F10 and selecting different recovery options, none of them worked. In the end I've been told I need to reach a support center (there's none in Zacatecas) and pay for a recovery CD/DVD that Sony "forgot" to put on the box.
I've torrented a "Windows 7 System Recovery Disc" but when booting from it now I see "Status: 0xc00000e9 Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred".
My gut is the laptop has a faulty HD. I just hope Sony would stand by its product, help me recover my data and get me a new HD or laptop that would work longer than a month ='(