Sony Warns Of Half A Million Melting Vaio Notebooks

The Tokyo-based conglomerate advised owners of F-Series and C-Series Vaio notebooks purchased this year to install a firmware update provided by Sony to fix the problem.

“Certain units within the VPCF11 and VPCCW2 notebook series are affected by this potential overheating issue. Sony recommends that all units in the VPCF11 and VPCCW2 series be updated with the firmware download,” wrote Mike Lucas, senior vice president of Sony’s Vaio business unit, in a notification published Wednesday on Sony’s eSupport Web site.

The notification listed about 60 F-Series Vaio models that were potentially affected by the overheating glitch and another 80 or so C-Series models.

Sony was actively recalling half a million affected notebooks sold around the world since January, according to some media reports, but the eSupport posting by Lucas seemed to indicate that the firmware fix might not make that necessary.

The eSupport notification does not mention a recall of affected Vaio models or the total number of notebooks that are affected, but The Wall Street Journal reported that in addition to the availability of the firmware update, “customers can have Sony come and pick the affected laptops up to do the repair work.”

The Journal also appeared to be the first to cite the 535,000 figure, further breaking that down to 259,000 affected laptops in the U.S., 120,000 in Asia, 103,000 in Europe and 52,000 in Japan.

Sony “has received a total of 39 reports of overheating and distortion from overseas customers,” according to The Journal, though there have been no cases of customers being burned by their Vaio notebooks.