Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Sony says 535,000 laptops at risk of overheating

A bug in the laptop BIOS means more than half a million laptops could overheat

More than half a million Sony laptops sold this year contain a software bug that could lead them to overheat, the company said Wednesday.

Sony has recorded 39 cases of overheating among Vaio F and C series laptops that have been on sale since January. In some cases the overheating has led the laptop case to deform.

A bug in the heat management system of the BIOS software is to blame. Sony is asking users to either update the software themselves or return their laptops so it can apply the update.

The fault affects 535,000 computers although Sony is asking a total of 646,000 owners to update their machines. The additional 111,000 machines are susceptible to several less serious problems that have also been found in the software, said Sony.

BIOS is present in every PC and runs below the operating system, controlling the most basic functions of the computer and interaction between major components. It's usually invisible to users except for a BIOS start-up message that is typically seen when a PC boots.

Sony didn't write the BIOS in the affected computers. It sourced it from a third party and had it customized for Vaio laptops by a different third-party supplier, the company said. But Sony did test it before installing it in the machines.

The problem affects machines sold both in Japan and the rest of the world.

Japanese models with the problem are the VPCF119FJ/BI, VPCF118FJ/W, VPCF117FJ/W, VPCCW29FJ/W, VPCCW28FJ/P, VPCCW28FJ/R, VPCCW28FJ/W, VPCF11AFJ, VPCF11AGJ, VPCF11AHJ, VPCF11ZHJ, VPCCW2AFJ, and VPCCW2AHJ.

Affected models sold outside Japan are the VPCCW25FG/B, VPCCW25FG/P and VPCCW25FG/W.

Martyn Williams covers Japan and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is martyn_williams@idg.com.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: IDG, PCCW, Sony
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: hardware systems, laptops, sony, vaio
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • IDC Forecast: Worldwide Purpose - Built Backup Appliance 2011 – 2015, Forecast Update: Explosive Growth in 2011
    This IDC Forecast Update provides share positions for revenue and raw capacity for nine named PBBA vendors for the first half of 2011. In addition, this study provides the market size and a five-year forecast for the worldwide PBBA market as part of IDC's Storage Solutions coverage. The five-year forecast includes total factory revenue and raw capacity in terabytes through 2012. The worldwide PBBA market covers both open system-and mainframe-attached products.
    Learn more »
  • Implementing Energy Efficient Data Centres
    Electrical power usage is not a typical design criterion for data centers, nor is it effectively managed as an expense. This is true despite the fact that the electrical power costs over the life of a data center may exceed the costs of the electrical power system including the UPS, and also may exceed the cost of the IT equipment. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Oracle x86 Rack Servers Optimized for Rapid Deployments and Operational Efficiency
    Business-critical and mission-critical workloads — demanding applications and databases — require stable and secure environments. When these types of workloads are deployed on x86 servers, the need to ensure business continuity, maximum uptime, and consistent processing means that IT managers and business unit managers are looking at enterprise x86 servers in a new way: They realize that the business depends on these servers and that x86 server platforms for the enterprise are no longer expendable, as they might have been when servers were dedicated to a single application — or when they were deployed as small Web servers that could be easily taken offline and replaced.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments