I love my Vaio-Z, but it's a bit like a Lamborghini - pretty and sleek, but not all that practical. It has a blazing graphics card but the fan noise could rouse a coma patient. Even worse, after a year it simply started shutting down because cooling wasn't working particularly well anymore, and the fan never goes below medium speed, even when idle. The RAID-SSDs failed too, and are extremely expensive to replace, so I had to put a new SSD in the optical drive bay.
Needless to say, next time I'll be buying something a bit more practical, and likely for a lot less money.
I have a Vaio that had a loud fan speed problem. I found a post online that said to go to the Windows advanced power settings and set the CPU power to 99% to make it slow down. It actually worked. Something about not letting the Intel Duo core chip go into turbo mode, which keeps it cooler.
Yep that prevents turbo which stops it from shutting down. Crippling the CPU is a pretty annoying fix, though.
Switching to the onboard Intel GPU works as well, but that means foregoing hardware decoding which means a bunch of things run like glue. I actually ended up just replacing the fan which solved the issue for at least another year until I can get a new copmuter.
That's pretty much the same experience I've had with my Z, though the random shutdowns mysteriously stopped about a year ago. My Z is now 4 years old, yet still is incredibly fast and responsive. Aside from the stupid fan it has been stellar.
Needless to say, next time I'll be buying something a bit more practical, and likely for a lot less money.