Windows Vista Sony Vaio all-in-one video errors

On boot, you see the vista loading bar, but in the background are vertical red lines. Before giving the "windows shut down due to" screen where you can pick "last known good configuration," you see a series of white dashed patterns across the screen, then "last known" and other options appear with the vertical stripes (not always red) in the background.

I attempted to start with "last known" and it just hangs on a black screen, with barely visible dark stripes in the background. Booting into safe mode is a little different. You see all the checks scroll across the screen, with stripes in the background, and when the desktop loads, you see the mouse, but white lines criss-cross throughout the screen.

I can't boot into windows to attempt to recover or install any video drivers. I'm not sure what to attempt next, since I've never worked on an all-in-one model. I would normally try switching out the monitor or the video card... but it doesn't seem like I can do that here.

Suggestions for the next step of troubleshooting? I'd think maybe recovery console, but the computer came with no discs - I was told that if we needed the restore and hardware discs, we'd have to call sony (I'm on the site now, and reading, but haven't found any troubleshooting tips that match the symptoms I've seen).

Is this a vista issue with drivers that got corrupted somehow? Or is this a hardware issue that I need to worry about?

 

Try booting into Low Resolution Mode rather than Safe Mode. If Safe Mode is corrupted, you may have little choice than to back up and reformat (they might call it something like "factory recovery ").