Hi Everyone, please can I share my situation and see if anyone has any ideas? I'm trying to help my brother out, but am at the outer limits of my knowledge. I'd like to do my best before this laptop gets thrown away - it's quite a good spec and I think it'd be a shame to trash it without trying. Also, I'd like to understand the problem for my own experience.
I've been searching online, but am not really any the wiser.
The laptop
Background / symptoms
This is my brother's laptop, it wouldn't boot, and before I was involved he'd already removed the hard drive, and had opened up the drive for a poke around (I know, I know, he's a mechanical engineer, he can't help himself), then thrown it away. There was nothing important on the drive (apart for the OS!) He came to me asking how to fit a new drive and install Windows.
He lives 100 miles away, so I mailed him a nice new SSD, a Windows 10 installer disk, and some instructions. No dice: it seems this model cannot use an SSD, it needs to be an old-school mechanical SATA HDD.
So I sent him a copy of Linux Mint on a USB stick, just to double check that the laptop worked at all - it booted nicely. My next step would have been to buy him a mechanical HDD, tell him how to install Windows, job done.
But that's when what I believe to be the main problem showed itself: the laptop spontaneously shuts down after running for approx 30 minutes. It didn't seem to be overheating, and I had him re-do the thermal paste, but no change.
What I have done
At this point I took the laptop away from him and started to explore myself. When I boot it into BIOS I can see the firmware is listed as version R0250DA, but the ME Version says 'UnKnow'.
Googling around suggested that a missing ME Region in BIOS could cause spontaneous shutdowns after a set period. (My brother swears he hasn't been meddling with the BIOS.)
I have found a tool that claims to be able to clean & inject a fixed ME Region setting ('Intel Easy Clean Me.exe'), but it's designed to run within Windows, which I don't currently have on the machine, and the machine won't run for long enough to install it. I've tried running it under a Windows Live CD that I made, but it still won't work. Of course, any time I'm on the laptop it's a race against time before it shuts down again.
Sony's support / download pages are not very helpful.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem before, and can you offer any tips? It seems like quite a nice laptop, shame to trash it. I bet it wasn't cheap when new.
If there some kind of software procedure / solution I can follow, I have nothing to lose. If the remedy for this sort of problem involves unsoldering and reprogramming chips, that's beyond my wits.
Thanks in advance for any tips / opinions, please let me know if I can elaborate on the situation.
I've been searching online, but am not really any the wiser.
The laptop
- Sony Vaio SVF1521K4E
- Intel Core i5 - 3337U, 1.80GHz x 2
- Onboard graphics
Background / symptoms
This is my brother's laptop, it wouldn't boot, and before I was involved he'd already removed the hard drive, and had opened up the drive for a poke around (I know, I know, he's a mechanical engineer, he can't help himself), then thrown it away. There was nothing important on the drive (apart for the OS!) He came to me asking how to fit a new drive and install Windows.
He lives 100 miles away, so I mailed him a nice new SSD, a Windows 10 installer disk, and some instructions. No dice: it seems this model cannot use an SSD, it needs to be an old-school mechanical SATA HDD.
So I sent him a copy of Linux Mint on a USB stick, just to double check that the laptop worked at all - it booted nicely. My next step would have been to buy him a mechanical HDD, tell him how to install Windows, job done.
But that's when what I believe to be the main problem showed itself: the laptop spontaneously shuts down after running for approx 30 minutes. It didn't seem to be overheating, and I had him re-do the thermal paste, but no change.
What I have done
At this point I took the laptop away from him and started to explore myself. When I boot it into BIOS I can see the firmware is listed as version R0250DA, but the ME Version says 'UnKnow'.
Googling around suggested that a missing ME Region in BIOS could cause spontaneous shutdowns after a set period. (My brother swears he hasn't been meddling with the BIOS.)
I have found a tool that claims to be able to clean & inject a fixed ME Region setting ('Intel Easy Clean Me.exe'), but it's designed to run within Windows, which I don't currently have on the machine, and the machine won't run for long enough to install it. I've tried running it under a Windows Live CD that I made, but it still won't work. Of course, any time I'm on the laptop it's a race against time before it shuts down again.
Sony's support / download pages are not very helpful.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem before, and can you offer any tips? It seems like quite a nice laptop, shame to trash it. I bet it wasn't cheap when new.
If there some kind of software procedure / solution I can follow, I have nothing to lose. If the remedy for this sort of problem involves unsoldering and reprogramming chips, that's beyond my wits.
Thanks in advance for any tips / opinions, please let me know if I can elaborate on the situation.
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