I purchased my VAIO SVS1312K3EW with pre-installed Windows 8 in November 2012 and since then I had no serious issues appart from the inconvienience of working with this new OS.

Last week I had the following problem : The was a message that I should reboot so that some hard disk problem can be corrected.

I restarted and in the boot screen below "VAIO" it showed "Preparing automatic repair..." or something similar.

After some hard disk activity the screen became blank and only the mouse cursor was visible. And that was it ... The laptop could not boot to Windows 8 anymore, only to a blank screen.

I contacted Sony service and they adviced to perform a hardware test from the VAIO recovery environment. I did and there were no errors. Then, they adviced that I should do a full recovery to factory conditions. To my strong objection that this would not help solve my problem, they just replied that this is standard procedure: client should wipe out everything and start over. Anyway, I had no option than to do the recovery, which also went through with no problem. The service reply was obviously: "Your problem has been solved. Contact us again if you experience problems in the future."

I sitting now in front of my laptop, with its Windows 8 start screen full of blinking and changing icons as it is when you start it for the first time, and I am thinking, what should I do?

Start again the painfull work of bringing Windows 8 to a state that I can do my work? or wipe everything out of the hard disk and put on a different OS?