A good start to the morning

"Windows failed to start" so it went into auto repair mode. Which seems to have worked. I'm guessing that it tried to install a bunch of updates on Friday night and ran out of power thus shutting down halfway through why it tries to update when it's on battery power beats me.

Anyway it seems to have done a system restore as Steam tried to start up despite me telling it not to. Hard drive activity is a bit mad though. I think because the Anit-virus was out of date and Java was trying to update at the same time.

[Update

Well I spoke too soon. After constant disk activity the laptop locked up and required a power down. Then it ran the System Repair again; then rebooted and ran it again; then sat there with no disk activity whatsoever for about an hour; I powered it off ran again. Ran system restore and got "cannot create a file when that file already exists" (0x800700b7)" ran a boot disc; system repair couldn't find a problem, ran system restore and got the same message; now it's running repair again and just siting there apparently doing nothing.]

[Out of repair and ran chkdsk with no problems running sfc and again it's just sitting there with the odd flicker of disk activity]. It did warn it'd take a while but half an hour without any indicators!]

[Update - Sony's own hardware test has thrown up an error on the hard drive surface scan I'm running a fix now]

[Update- Then chkdsk ran then failed. Seems ecache.sys is corrupt; a file taht seems to cause no end of fuss on the 'net. Of course there's no copy on the drive you have to get it from the installation CD; you know that one that almost never comes with a pre-installed computer anymore. No it's not on the recovery discs either at least not in any form I can get at.]