That's a pretty tough case.
Knowing how it started, it sound very much like a hardware error which got worse and worse to the point it prevents anything now.
The old error searching method is this: change something, watch carefully. Repeat.
The troubleshooting tips really cover most of the possible causes. Maybe you can also try:
- remove all the ram. Try to start. Any beeps? Anything different?
- remove the HDD. Try to start. Any beeps? Anything different?
- I can't think anything else now you can easily remove...
One thing that got me thinking was the list of issues that the latest (downloadable) BIOS upgrade is supposed to resolve:
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VP...
"Hang and freeze", "black screen at startup". They don't explain, how and when exactly these happen, so I can't be sure if this has anything to do with your case.
*If* they do, a BIOS update would be something worth to try. However, the only possible way for updating the BIOS would be a "BIOS recovery", and unfortunately it seems, that the method for Sony Vaios is not known. I've searched for it, found requests, found suggestions in BiOS-mod forums like mydigitallife.info forums, but nowhere a success report. Some even suggested that Sony disabled it, some think that it's there, but noone had found it yet.
I downloaded the BIOS from the website above, I extracted the BIOS file from that executable with Universal Extractor (
http://legroom.net/software/uniextract ) in a two step process, which resulted the following file:
ISBSYS-00243219-1040.EXE\TEMPEXEFOLDER\EP0000243219\R0200Z5.ROM 2 097 152 2011.01.11 07:49 -a--
Usually the recovery has two "unknowns":
- the name of the BIOS file, which has to be copied on a FAT32 formatted usb pendrive. This can be the one it comes out with: "R0200Z5.ROM", but there are several variations.
- the key (or key combination) you have to keep pressed down during the whole startup, with the usb pendrive attached.
Hmm... now that I try to find the page that I found yesterday, I came across a message which tells about a successful flash recovery with a VAIO:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/32641-Problems...
(AND! it's a fresh one too, you may want to join that forum, and try to contact/Private Message that person, "Turbostaater" for the exact steps he had success with.)
It references this step-by-step method description:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/13095-Undocume...
If you want to give it a go, and you need further assistance, say so. I'm not a big expert, but have done this before on a Dell computer, and I helped a guy once with a bricked ASUS laptop here, on Tomshardware too (
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/74604-20-asus-u52f-... ) . That was a big success, I wish you the same.