What causes "Premature Deactivation"?

When Sony designed the first Vaio laptops, the fastest CPU chip Intel made for portable computers ran at 166 mHz, and Sony designed their processor board and heatsink/fan to dispose of the heat generated by that chip.

When subsequent products using faster and faster chips were developed, they don't seem to have bothered to go back and redesign the thermal tolerance of the CPU subsystem, with the result that numerous components in the newer models overheat and cause instability in the processor.

The components on the CPU daughterboard that are susceptible to this "heat-death" are too numerous to list, but they fall into three groups: the CPU itself, the "glue" logic that connects the Random Access Memory (RAM) and other subsystems to the processor, and the "discrete" resistors and capacitors that distribute voltages throughout the board.

The most immediate consequence of this instability is a false "overheat" signal that causes the operating system's Power Management software to shut down the computer prematurely. In advanced cases, the computer won't start up at all.

Our fix replaces the subpar components with superior parts having greater thermal tolerance.