overheating laptop ?? or something else ??

[A-Money]

so i own a sony vaio laptop that was purchased brand new xmas 08 at best buy. it has been working perfectly fine up until yesterday. now when i turn it on it either loads up to vista for a little while and shuts itself down or something doesn't make it boot all the way up. is this a case of defect in the laptop and it is overheating or what is the cause of this ? any solutions or tips to try to rectify this situation ? i'm currently overseas for the next month and this laptop is still under warranty but i'm sure its not valid worldwide.

any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[sickcars]

Well before it shuts down do you hear the fans going on high and making lots of noise or is it normal and you dont hear it speed up?

Could it be a bad harddrive or windows being corrupt or something?

[tapanpatel88]

Did you try booting into safe mode? If it boots fine, try doing a system recovery.

If you want to determine if the problem is linked to overheating, go into your laptop's bios and see if there is an option to monitor CPU temperatures. If its above 50-60 degree centigrade, then its probably because of overheating.

Try this: Turn off your laptop and leave it aside for atleast a couple of hours. Boot it on and see if the same problem occurs. On a cold start, theoretically your computer should last longer into bootup if the problem is linked to overheating. If it shuts down in the same amount of time, most probably its a windows corruption which could be easily fixed by reformatting. Also possible that your hard drive is dying out.

On a further note, try running your laptop on a single dimm of RAM. More than 50% of the times, its also the memory thats corrupt. I remember fixing a Toshiba laptop a few weeks ago that was encountering problems with Vista's turbo memory module. Just had to turn it off and it started working fine.