Good day,
I have a SONY VAIO PCG-K45. This has the WXGA LCD Screen (1200x768) and I have no complaints about the computer or OS (MS Windows XP Home) itself but I noticed something peculiar with the LCD.
Once in a blue moon, I power up the unit and is does its normal boot sequence OK. Then, as it says its "Starting Windows..." the LCD backlight turns OFF. It is clearly NOT the LCD connections or anything otherwise you would not see the boot sequence, and "Starting Windows..." display, which are in full LCD backlight.
When the backlight goes off, and if you hold the screen up to bright light, you could see the screen OK ... Windows up and running fine, no errors, even edited video this way! This reminds me of the Sony Camcorders, particularly my HDR-FX1, where there is a 3-position switch for the "LCD Flip-Out screen" back-light saying "Hi", "Lo", and "Off". When OFF, the LCD only can be viewed in bright sunlight (I guess it is a battery saving feature).
Now back to my laptop, has anyone else ever seen this? Is there a "switch" in windows (besides the F-Key on the screen which only goes from low to high brightness and does NOT turn off backlighting)? I also found that if my unit powers up and boots and the backlight is off, sometimes closing the LCD cover and opening it turns it on. It might be a switch there, and fiddling with it might help?
As expected, Sony customer service had no idea of this problem but I did flash the "Phoenix BIOS" to a latest version. We'll see if that helps since this looks like an intermittent problem and hard to pinpoint its cause.
Chris C - KG4PJN
