Yesterday, a user’s VAIO BX640 dropped dead in the middle of a meeting. It didn’t come back, and by that I mean “nothing happens when you press the power button”. After swapping in different battery and power supply, I called for service.

This afternoon, another user reported that he wasn’t getting sound out of his BX640, and the headphone jack just made ticking noises. It doesn’t even make the magical VAIO noise when you power it on. I swapped parts around, reset the BIOS, etc. No luck. This isn’t a critical issue, so I’ll wait until Monday to ship it off for service, but it’s disturbing, because they’re both motherboard problems. And so was the only other one of my (more than a dozen) BX640s to fail so far, several months ago…