Graphical Weirdness in both neighborhood Screen and on lots... Part II

[Lorelei]

It's a refurb Vaio, so no owner's manual, just manuals about media center tools and Bluray. This is not the first time I've been annoyed by this, so I should bug Sony to send me one.

Did the sellers make back up reinstall copies and hand them on to you?  I don't know about all Vaios, but mine came without cds, the system restore stuff was all on the machine and I had to make my own copies.  If you weren't given the cds, I'd check to see if the info is still there, or whether they erased it, if it's still there make copies before you need them, and it it isn't, see if you can get copies from the Vaio website, again before you need them.

They did not.

I already have backup disks, but for a different reason (long story, too tired to bitch about Geek Squad ATM). Also have a backup of lesser items / data on a half-Tb external drive.

[ZephyrZodiac]

That's bad, not handing the back-ups over - or since it's refurbished, maybe it wasn't the original owner who was at fault!  And the trouble with Vaios is like with IBMs, they have their own versions of Windows which won't work on any other machine (at least, I know IBMs stuff won't), and without the original backups you have a problem with identifying your ownership of the software.  Very annoying.