Sony Vaio laptop specs and other questions.. 1

[Thesuperiorone]

I am working on a laptop for somebody.. Model: Sony Vaio PCG-9B3L.. She had pop ups and spyware and the "usual" stuff..

Another complaint was that her HDD was running out of room, so I look at My Computer and C Drive is about 7.5 gb, drive D is 11.1 gb total space. I assume D is for the image / restore files, but why would this computer leave so little room for other stuff (drive c)?

Also, I can not find specs on this at all. Sony.com does not have it, Google only comes up with batteries pretty much.

Big question, ifI were to replace the HDD in here, would any laptop hard drive work? She is running out of space fast, I don't know what the hell to tell her on this one.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Chris

 

[micker377]

Sounds lika a normal 20 gig hard drive. You can usually put in any drive that the BIOS will handle. On my Gateway, I took out the 4 gig, and put in a 30 gig. The usual BIOs break points are 8, 30, 120 gig hard drives. All you can do (unless you can find someone with exact specs), is give it a try. Just remember that you will need the drivers for that particular laptop. You should be able to "clone" the hard drive to a new larger drive, and that will save all your drivers and settings. What OS are you using? It's always better to do a "fresh" install. That's when you need all those drivers you down loaded from Sony before you started.

 

[micker377]

Try

http://esupport.sony.com/

 

[Thesuperiorone]

The system is using WinXP. I thought about the cloning idea, it might work if I can use something line norton ghost..

Micker- I input the model number there and it comes up with something completely different.. a Model PCGFXA47.... IT does not appear to be the same model..

Chris

 

[micker377]

I noticed the discreptency also, I thought you had merely mis-typed your model number. Are you sure "PCG-9B3L" is correct?

 

[Thesuperiorone]

I ended up lookign further, and there was something almost too small to see, labeled PCG-FXA47 on the right side under the screen.. That pulled it up. Apparently only 7 gigs is useful for anything while the recovery software is there. I told her about it, an we figured out what we want to do...

NExt question: How to access the recovery files on startup?

Thanks

Chris

 

[micker377]

How to access the recovery partition should be in the manual. Sometimes it is as simple as hitting a certain key while booting. Once you have it straitened out, make a back-up (for safety), to an external USB drive. After this try cloning to a larger drive (as posted above). Cloning shouldn't have any effect on the original drive. The main thing is, you will have a back-up in case of problems.

[Once (during my last marriage), I accidently erased my wife's Tax Accounting (she does this for a living) partition! I believe in back-ups for safety.]

 

[G0AOZ]

[Once (during my last marriage), I accidently erased my wife's Tax Accounting..."

You only ever get to do that once...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[Thesuperiorone]

Well, I ghosted the active partition. I'm going to use the recovery tonight, then ghost the BASIC install of it, then merge the two partitions and re-install the main Ghost file.. Hopefully this will work..

Chris