I've had my Vaio SZ240 for a little over a year now and it's been a wonderful little notebook...no complaints aside from poor cooling during processor-intensive tasks (my CPU temp hit 100C when converting an HD video before I elevated it to improve air flow and turned a box fan on it). Yesterday and quite mysteriously my battery disappeared from Windows and stopped working at every level. Before this the battery worked great averaging about 4 hours in stamina mode and 2-3 in speed mode, peaking at 9.5 hours with a great deal of tweaking (only did this once and I couldn't do much more than browse the internet in a dark room in this mode). Anyways...
The battery is dead, completely dead. Doesn't show up in windows; when I plug it in there's no battery charging light. When I unplug the AC adapter the computer just shuts off. When I push the power button when it's unplugged nothing in the least happens. When I unplug when windows is in standby all the data is lost. The battery held its charge up until yesterday and I'd properly conditioned the battery when I first got the laptop. I've cared for the laptop and I've never spilled liquid on it or anything like that. I spent about 2 hours on the phone with Sony and talked to about 12 people; turns out the battery would have been covered under the one-year manufacturer's warranty 14 days ago and the 3-year extended plan doesn't cover anything to do with batteries. I've never heard of a battery just ceasing to function on every level like this I'm wondering if this is as anomalous as I think it is. Unless I hear back from you all that this happens all the time I'll be writing a formal complaint to Sony stating that an anomalous hardware failure of this nature should be covered under the 3-year plan I bought. I wouldn't care as much if the battery stopped holding it's charge or something of that nature, but this kind of failure is unacceptable.
So...anyone out there heard of or had a problem like this after more than a year of normal use?
edit: I also swapped in my friend's battery to make sure it wasn't something on the motherboard. It worked fine with my friend's battery
The battery is dead, completely dead. Doesn't show up in windows; when I plug it in there's no battery charging light. When I unplug the AC adapter the computer just shuts off. When I push the power button when it's unplugged nothing in the least happens. When I unplug when windows is in standby all the data is lost. The battery held its charge up until yesterday and I'd properly conditioned the battery when I first got the laptop. I've cared for the laptop and I've never spilled liquid on it or anything like that. I spent about 2 hours on the phone with Sony and talked to about 12 people; turns out the battery would have been covered under the one-year manufacturer's warranty 14 days ago and the 3-year extended plan doesn't cover anything to do with batteries. I've never heard of a battery just ceasing to function on every level like this I'm wondering if this is as anomalous as I think it is. Unless I hear back from you all that this happens all the time I'll be writing a formal complaint to Sony stating that an anomalous hardware failure of this nature should be covered under the 3-year plan I bought. I wouldn't care as much if the battery stopped holding it's charge or something of that nature, but this kind of failure is unacceptable.
So...anyone out there heard of or had a problem like this after more than a year of normal use?
edit: I also swapped in my friend's battery to make sure it wasn't something on the motherboard. It worked fine with my friend's battery
