Sony Australia has refused to answer questions as to whether its Vaio laptops are equipped with faulty graphics chips from Nvidia.The problem comes only months after the company admitted that certain Vaio notebooks were prone to melting after overheating.

Overseas, Sony, who is losing millions selling their designer range of premium priced notebooks, is offering to repair notebooks with the faulty Nvidia graphics processors which cause laptops to overheat and ultimately fail.

In Australia, there are no company announcements relating to the problem.

This is not the first time this year Sony has had problems with their Vaio notebooks.

Sony recently discovered that certain VAIO “TZ series” notebooks were overheating and burning out plastic components. Yet despite this the Company made no announcements to either ChannelNews or SmartHouse that the problem existed.

A note discovered on the Sony web site said “A symptom may arise in which the unit’s plastic could be deformed in the DC jack inlet or LCD surrounding area due to extreme high temperatures. This has the potential to affect models which were sold between May 2007 and July 2008”.

This is the same company that was responsible for the manufacture of millions of faulty batteries that led to some notebooks bursting into flames.

Overseas, Sony is offering free repairs and extended warranty on certain Vaio models with Nvidia graphics chips made of faulty die and weak packaging material.

Users only become aware of the graphic problems when the screen shows distorted video, duplicate images or a blank screen due to failure of the Nvidia chip, the company said on a support webpage.

As a result of the problem, Sony is offering an extended three-year warranty in addition to the standard 12-month warranty. No refunds for the laptops are being offered by Sony.