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My friend has a Sony Viao Model PCG-6C2L. Recently, his laptop has been acting strange. It freezes 5 minutes after if he uses basic programs such as Microsoft Powerpoint. Now when he turns on the laptop, it turns on, but nothing is displayed on the screen. He does not hear the sound the laptop usually plays when I hear the power button.

Prior to this, he getsan error saying that his display driver stops working in the middle of doing things.

He leaves his laptop on for long times, and it gets pretty hot sometimes, so maybe the temperature affected his graphics and display driver?

Please help him! He has an essay on there and he does not want to retype the WHOLE thing again.

If the laptop has an external VGA output, I would try hooking a monitor up to it and seeing if had any video. The display driver error was probably caused by overheating (see below).

Is the laptop's display lit up with the backlight? If not, it could be a power inverter failure (which is pretty common). You can usually get replacement inverters for USD$40-80 on eBay or other places, and usually only take about 20-30 minutes to install.

As for the freezing issue, that could be any number of things but considering that he leaves it on all the time it could very well be due to overheating. Almost every laptop I have ever opened (which is several) has lint, dust, and other crap clogging the internal heat exchangers. This is because people usually run them on their laps, beds, and other surfaces that are not clean and flat with good air clearance under them.

Hope this helps get your friend back up and running.