A troubleshooting page to deal with issues on the Sony Vaio PCG-61A12L.
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The laptop won’t charge, loses charge rapidly, or will immediately shut down when unplugged.
If the laptop is not charging, the charging light is not on, replace the charger. Purchase a new charger compatible with the laptop as a replacement.
If the charger has been replaced and the laptop will not charge or loses charge rapidly a battery replacement is needed. Purchase a new battery compatible with the laptop. To replace the battery follow this guide and remember to dispose of the battery properly.
Your laptop cannot retrieve any documents, photos, or other programs from storage.
Look for any damaged areas on your laptop, if you had dropped your laptop this could have damaged your hard drive causing the information stored to unreachable. If the problem is physical then a sound could be coming from the hard drive. The damaged hard drive will need to be replaced with a new one and the information may be retrieved from a backup. Another issue commonly faced would be poor ventilation, the fan of the laptop barely or not working. The improper ventilation leads to the hard drive to be damaged due to the increased heat. The laptop would need a new hard drive to replace the damaged one. Follow this guide to replace your damaged hard drive.
Your laptop has trouble when booting up or any laborious task.
If your laptop has a program or multiple programs that have filled up the memory storage capacity of the RAM. This will slow down your laptop as the RAM storage is already filled with little to no room for more data to be kept. Consider purchasing a RAM with a large storage to accommodate for the multiple programs. In the case of a bad RAM, the laptop would experience symptoms like blue screens, crashing, or screen freezing. This would require you to purchase and change the laptop RAM to fix your laptop issues. Here is a step by step guide to help you replace the laptop RAM.
You insert a disk into the drive and computer says it can’t read it.
Insert a disk (CD or DVD) and see if the disk can be read. If the files can be displayed but cannot be opened, it is a wrong format. If none of the content is visible then the optical drive is faulty and needs replacement.
Disk drive is stuck and won’t allow you to insert any discs at all. You would need to remove the optical drive to check the problem to see if a replacement is needed. Use this guide to remove the optical drive.
The laptop attempts to shut down while you are on.
Check the fan to see for little to no movement of the fan’s blades. There could be dust stuck onto the fan causing the fan to stop and the laptop to overheat. The dust on the fan builds up overtime and needs to be cleaned or replaced. Besides dust there could also be a small object jamming the blades of the fan that stops the fan. If the small object has damaged the fan then a replacement is needed.
