I emailed sony the following:
Regarding my family members recent purchase of the Sony Vaio VGN-AR71M,
A couple of weeks ago, I came to turn the laptop on in the morning before leaving the house, this is when the problem occurred, it began with an error on load up which caused a long black screen lasting about fifteen/twenty minutes, after a restart it began with a ‘recommended’ windows system repair process. This then proceeded to take the majority of the day to complete, I came home to see that it was turned off. I turned it back on again to find that it took around an hour to turn on with every process i did taking up to 15 minutes to complete. After this discovery i backed up my files and restored the C: drive. However after some time it is still as it was when the problem first occured.
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I then contacted sony and recieved this reply:
Thank you for contacting us.
If I can ask you to run two items for me to confirm that there are no hardware errors with the computer.
The first is the VAIO Hardware Diagnostics Tool.
To run this go to Start - Programs - VAIO Recovery Center/Utility.
From here you will then have an option to run the Diagnostics.
Also if you can run a Scan Disk on the Hard Drives on the computer.
Again to run these go to Start - Computer. Right click on the C: Drive and select Properties. Select the Tools Tab. Click on Check Now under Error Checking. Please ensure that both options are selected and click on Start.
Your computer will then run the Disk check once Windows has been restarted.
Please let us know if any errors are detected during either of these tests.
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I have done both, and returned no errors, but my laptop is still not as it was when it was first used near christmas time, however after 2 weeks of no reply i sent the same message 2 days ago.
Sorry for the long post, but i wondered if anybody could help/suggest anything?
Thankyou all 
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