Computer Problem, Need some advice
 

My wife has a Sony Vaio computer that is just over a year old that has Vista. It has worked well but for about the last three weeks it is acting up. Every other day or so while she is on it (always plugged in) for a varying amount of time it will just shut down. No warning, no error messages just basically turns off. The computer sometimes can be on for 10 minutes or hours and I check it for heat but that cannot be it as it is cool as anything. I turn it back on and sometimes it will load up normally and sometimes as it is starting up again it will shut itself down again suddenly as it is going through the process. After a few attempts it will eventually get back to the actual windows screen and work normally until the next shut down a day later or two. I have run a virus scan and it didn't come back with any issues or spyware. I also took it to Geek squad since we have the two year protection plan on it, they blamed it on heat and dust but since it is still doing it that can't be true.

If anyone has any ideas please share, she is going crazy.

I don't know if there's anything in here that will help you but a quick Google turns up enough evidence to convince me that you're not alone on this problem (some references are to desktops, others are to laptops)

sony vaio randomly shuts down - Google Search

Thanks for the link and help. Unfortunately that is exactly the search I tried three weeks ago to begin with and the threads just didn't seem to point to something that I could take action on let alone convince me it was the same exact issue as them. I appreciate the link regardless though since we all search and sometimes a magic word gets us more then a search we try at a earlier time.

Unfortunately, this could be caused by a number of problems and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the cause is without a lot of trial and error.

The first things that pop into my mind are faulty hard drive or bad windows install. However, just about any piece of hardware in the laptop could be causing it to randomly shut down. I'd suggest a reformat to see if it fixes it. If that doesn't fix it and it's not caused by overheating you're it's almost certain to be a piece of hardware and, as I said above, I'd start with the hard drive.

My advice would be to go back to Best Buy and get them to fix it for you. I mean, you have the warranty, they should honor it.

That being said, some googling seems to suggest a problem with a transistor that causes it to think it is overheating and it goes into thermal shutdown.

Thanks everyone. I did think of transistor as being a possible issue in this case. I am definitely taking it back and having them fix it, I just wanted to get other opinions on the cause so I could be more educated myself on the issue at hand.

I dunno if there is a way to set it to bypass the thermal shutdown sensor. Would be a way to test if that is the problem. Sounds like build quality on these was not the greatest