Windows 7 System Freeze Sony Vaio Laptop - Solved

Unusually this thread is not asking for a solution to a problem but rather describing a solution to one.

A friend of mine who has had a Vaio Laptop (model VPCEE2S1E) for several years had just started to experience system freezes. She would be using the laptop (running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit) for either a few minutes or anything up to 3 hours when all of a sudden the system would freeze - the cursor would disappear and the system would lock solid. Sometimes she would be handling email, sometimes the system would be downloading/installing Windows updates, sometimes it would be idle. There was no Blue Screen of Death. The system would just freeze and nothing other than a hard power off would change the situation. Following the hard power off the system would start up again with the normal Widows message saying the system had been abnormally shut down. There were no error messages produced at the time of the freeze and there were no entries in the Windows Event Log for the time the problem occurred.

I tried all sorts of things to resolve the problem including re-installing Win 7 from the Sony Vaio supplied system recovery disks and applying all fixes - sometimes the system would stay up long enough to make a lot of progress and sometimes it would freeze during these updates so the reinstall took quite a while. I also searched the web and found quite a few entries relating to freezes and discussing issues involving a conflict between power management settings and AMD processors and I tried the suggestions of setting power to 100% no matter whether the system was running on battery or mains but nothing worked. I checked the Sony Vaio web site (not a very good site in my opinion) and noticed the BIOS was out of date so I updated this, but again no change. Apart from the BIOS update the only other items on the Vaio web site were a load of proprietary software updates mainly relating to audio/video media applications and a single SATA driver update - however I did not appear to have any disk related problems and anyway I had used the Sony restore media to reinstall the operating system.

I was on the point of giving up when I came across some threads mentioning possible connections between freezing and SATA disk drivers. I checked the Vaio site again and decided that maybe it was worth giving the SATA driver a try. Much to my amazement this appears to have resolved the problem. Why there should be a problem here astounds me - the system was using Microsoft Win 7 drivers, the disk drive is a standard HDD and there were no event log entries about ANY disk errors.

I am not suggesting updated SATA drivers will resolve other Windows 7 freezes but for this particular Vaio laptop model this solution appears to have cracked the problem - the system has been running trouble free with no other change for several days now.

Hi first of all I just wanted to thank the op for the additional information regarding Sony Vaio freezing, because I've almost been to the end of the Internet looking for a fix for mine. lol. I had been dealing with the same unanswered freezing problem with my Vaio for several months, and it continued to happen across several different fresh os installs, a brand new hard drive + a fresh os install, 2 brand new sets of ram, and I could always be wrong but also through every driver update known to man. I was literally about to lose my mind and although unfortunately this thread wasn't the fix for mine, it did at least give me something new to try and I definitely appreciate it! Anyway in case someone else happens to stumble upon this thread with the same problem like I did, I thought I'd post the fix for mine just in case it might help. It turned out to be the charging port on my Sony Vaio, and it was definitely not obvious because I never had any problems charging my battery, so I never imagined it could cause random freezing problems. I had got my Vaio used and it was in excellent condition, and the only "issue" I ever noticed was that the charger cable fit somewhat loosely into the port, but it never effected the charging whatsoever and even if I wiggled or moved the cable it never broke connection. I did take it into consideration while trying to diagnose the problem, but the freezing would never happen whenever I moved the cable so it just didn't seem like it could be the culprit. Anyway after pulling my hair out for months and just about giving up and assuming a bad motherboard, I figured it was only a $7 part so why not at least try... and then Bob's your uncle it completely fixed the random freezing problem! Lol. I always say never rule anything out when diagnosing something, and stuff like this is exactly the reason why! Anyway thanks again for the info and hopefully all of this might help the next person dealing with this issue!