Sony Vaio VGN-S460B woes...

This morning I've been fighting with my wife's laptop. It's a Sony Vaio VGN-S460B craptop. It dual boots Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu 7.10. The thing is that once you turn off the computer it won't boot again. It either won't give a BIOS screen or halts at a keyboard error. It locks at this point and the only thing that seems to work (but not consistently) is to remove all power sources, hit the power button a few times the reconnect everything. After doing this a few times (like 25) it will finally boot.

It's had new memory installed (1.2GB), keyboard cleaned, battery replaced, power supply replaced. I hate this thing.

Now, to make matters worse, my wife really only likes using windows and the wireless works less that 10% of the time.

Using Ubuntu 7.10 the wireless is rock solid, but I can't get my wife to adjust. One big problem with Ubuntu is that it won't shut down properly most of the time. When the shutdown process is started, the screen will begin to fade and the screen will go corrupt then finally it will go black. The computer just sits there still powered on. You have to press and hold the power button to finally shut the computer off.

If I could fix the shut down issue with Ubuntu, I think I MIGHT get her to use it more. It sure is less problematic than windows on this Craptop. Perhaps the next Ubuntu release will cure the issue.