Most of the teenagers would buy a Vaio only for its looks. Moreover, the premium laptop these days is being promoted by Bollywood’s size zero diva Kareena Kapoor. I wonder whether she has time for using one. I certainly have. My horrid one year experience with one of them has forced me to come out from my 2 month slumber and blog.
August 2008 I decided to shell out a few extra bucks and buy a Vaio. Similar configuration was available in other brands such as Dell, HP etc for a much lesser price. But then, I was totally blinded by the looks and purchased VGN CR-353 for 53k. Mind you the superfluous purchase was before recession had started.
After about 8 months in March 2009, I started facing a peculiar problem. After working fine for a certain time, the laptop suddenly started to shut down randomly, without any connection to what I did. Initially, I overlooked the problem, as the frequency of the same was once a week. How could there be anything wrong with a Vaio.
In May 2009, the frequency increased and I decided to go to a Sony authorized service station. The concerned person told me that the problem is temporary. Solution is to use the laptop on battery for few days as the system gets over heated on direct supply. I trusted him on my life. How could a Sony service station engineer say anything wrong?
Well, I was in for a big surprise.
June 2009 I left for Mumbai and left the prized possession with my Dad. In my absence the problem kept on increasing and another visit to the service station resulted in the same reply. In August 2009, the guarantee expired and so did my laptop. Currently the system shuts down every time I use CPU intensive applications (Movies, Games or running time of more than 30min on direct supply).
The symptoms of overheating are:
· It works fine as long as you don't run any CPU intensive applications. But when you stress it, it works for a while (10-15 minutes) and shuts down.
· Once it does shut down, it will shut down sooner if you restart it without giving it time to cool off. Then the cycle starts again.
My Vaio is currently an ultra modern elegant looking typewriter. The only application that I can run on it is Microsoft Office. The good news is that I can run the advanced Office 2007.
Using the laptop is a very complicated procedure. It works on direct supply for some time. To avoid over heating it is switched to battery mode. When the battery is about to discharge it is again connected to direct supply. This switching of power supply increases the runtime to few hours. But one has to be very precise on time. This skill gets developed with time.
For those who are still not convinced, try this. Type “vaio premature shutdown” in Google search. You will get an astonishing 356,000 results. I wish I had done this before buying one.
