having problems with www.popvoucher.co.uk, approx 18 months old,basically dead as a dodo apart from the vaio logo appearing on the start up screen, someone suggested re installing the windows media centre disc, but the laptop came pre loaded and i did not actually get any discs with it, i should point out that i bought it from a sony centre and at the time assumed this was the norm, does anyone know if there is some sort of recovery gizmo installed that would allow me to reset the whole thing. any help is appreciated

Vaios come w/ the recovery software on the HD. You're expected to copy the recovery program from the HD onto a DVD.

The Vaio I owned years ago had a startup program that explained how to burn the disc. There was also a program just for burning the recovery partition.

If you can't get to Windows, then you won't be able to burn the recovery disc. About the only alternatives right now are boot w/ a Linux LiveCD and try to burn the recovery disc that way, use a regular Windows CD to install a vanilla Windows installation, or contact Sony to see if they can provide a recovery disc.