Sony Vaio SZ110 -- Please help!

I recently bought one of these used to replace my aging desktop computer, and I installed Vista on it. Shortly after doing so I noticed the laptop was running awfully hot on the bottom, and remembered something about a fan control program in XP that was installed when I got it. I also noted I couldn't discern any fan-running noises coming from the laptop. I downloaded "Speedfan" and checked the core temps, and they were peaking around 90 degrees Celsius! I shut the laptop down in a hurry, and am currently letting it cool down. (I'm on a desktop now) Am I missing something? The laptop was plugged in and I set Vista's power settings to High Performance mode when plugged in, so it should have enabled the fan. Speedfan didn't seem to make any difference; installing it didn't enable the fans or anything.

Is there a program I can use to manually crank the fan speed up? I've tried Googling it but found nothing relevant. Thought I'd ask here since you all have a lot of Vaio experience. Thanks in advance!

 

The fan is mostly BIOS controlled... Does the fan spin up during the booting process? If it doesn't, then I'd say there's a problem with it.

 

I didn't notice if it did during boot up or not. I know that there was a program in Windows that I accidentally activated when I pressed the (S2) shortcut button above the keyboard that dropped the fan speed to 0. I pressed it again and it restored to normal speed then, but it doesn't seem to run at all in Vista. I'll go check and see if it fires up during boot.

Is the Vaio Power Management program seen here something I need to look into?

 

Yeah, try booting into BIOS. It usually has all the fan info. If things are not good, see if you can return it.

 

Tried Bios, no fan settings there. Tried Vaio Power Management from Sony's support website, and now if I try and edit my Advanced Power Options, I get a Rundll32.exe error. Speedfan reports the following:

(All temps Celsius)
GPU: 56 degrees
Temp1: 71 degrees
Temp2: 75 degrees
Temp3: 75 degrees
Core0: 45 degrees
Core1: 45 degrees

Now, this is with the laptop propped up against a fan circulating air through the vents in the bottom. I'm pretty sure the core temps are acceptable, but the Temp1-3 are worrying me. According to Speedfan those are ACPI. Not sure what that means. I'm going to take the comp off the fan and see if the temperature increases; maybe that will lend more info.

 

At what temperature should the coolant fans come on? I understand they stay off most of the time to conserve power, but there should be a temperature switch to enable them...

 

I really need help here, guys. I'm pretty sure I got ripped off; the laptop's CPU's overheated all the way to 90 degrees Celsius. The Intel file reports that the T2400 Core Duo can run all the way up to 100 degrees Celsius safely, but that's a) too close to comfort for me, and b) not exactly comfortable on the lap.

Any ideas?

 

Here's what you can do to troubleshoot the problem:

- Make sure the proper Vista drivers and utilities are installed. The SZ110 is similar to the SZ4XX series, besides the webcam, and their drivers and utilities are more updated. They're located here:

ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/VAIO/ORIGINAL/SZ4_UTILITIES.ZIP
ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/VAIO/ORIGINAL/SZ4_DRIVERS.ZIP

You'll still need to use the SZ1 camera driver located here, which may or may not work with Vista... I don't remember (use Universal Extractor to extract the drivers.) The Vista clean installation procedure is similar to XP's procedure, which is located here, but use the Vista drivers and utilities.

The most updated Vista intel chipset, intel wlan, marvell-yukon lan and intel gfx are in my clean xp thread. To use the nvidia brightness hotkeys with updated drivers, install the original Sony nvidia driver first, then go to LaptopVideo2Go, pick and install any highly rated Vista 32-bit driver here (make sure to read the comments, too.)

- Update the BIOS to R0112N0

- Open the bottom CPU panel, remove the heatsink, reseat it with good thermal compound like AS5, and clear out any dust in the fan and grill.

On second thought, if what you said earlier is true, in that the fan doesn't appear to be running, there definitely might be a hardware issue. You should find out if this is actually the case, because the fan should be running at all times, regardless of the cpu and gpu temperatures.

 

I should point out again that the fan should never actually shut off. It's always on at some level. When I boot, it comes on briefly at full RPM (and this should be obviously loud) and then slows down.

If you aren't getting ANY fan at ANY time, then I would lean towards the fan not working, not some software issue.