[peroo]

I love my Vaio-Z, but it's a bit like a Lamborghini - pretty and sleek, but not all that practical. It has a blazing graphics card but the fan noise could rouse a coma patient. Even worse, after a year it simply started shutting down because cooling wasn't working particularly well anymore, and the fan never goes below medium speed, even when idle. The RAID-SSDs failed too, and are extremely expensive to replace, so I had to put a new SSD in the optical drive bay.

Needless to say, next time I'll be buying something a bit more practical, and likely for a lot less money.

[hcrisp]

I have a Vaio that had a loud fan speed problem. I found a post online that said to go to the Windows advanced power settings and set the CPU power to 99% to make it slow down. It actually worked. Something about not letting the Intel Duo core chip go into turbo mode, which keeps it cooler.

[peroo]

Yep that prevents turbo which stops it from shutting down. Crippling the CPU is a pretty annoying fix, though.

Switching to the onboard Intel GPU works as well, but that means foregoing hardware decoding which means a bunch of things run like glue. I actually ended up just replacing the fan which solved the issue for at least another year until I can get a new copmuter.

[homersapien]

That's pretty much the same experience I've had with my Z, though the random shutdowns mysteriously stopped about a year ago. My Z is now 4 years old, yet still is incredibly fast and responsive. Aside from the stupid fan it has been stellar.