Sony Vaio VPC-CW290X bios upgrade for thermal problems

My daughter has a Sony Vaio VPC-CW290X purchased in spring 2010, that has on several occasions just shut down, likely due to overheating (no logged errors).

Just this week I discovered Sony eSupport - Electronics - Drivers & Software from June 2010 (a few months after she got the laptop), acknowledging the issues, and providing a BIOS update to version R0170Y7 to address this.

So I upgraded her computer this week.

Side note: The instructions mention At the "BIOS Update successfully completed" dialog box, click "OK" to shutdown the computer. - and no such dialog box ever appeared. I ran the update twice and it never appeared. Given the ramifications of goofing up a bios update, this scared me. But we finally shut the computer down for a few minutes, started it, and it booted right up and the bios had been upgraded correctly.

But here's my question: How can a mere bios update "fix" an overheating problem? Maybe making the fan turn more often or faster, but really, it can't clean the heatsink, clear dust, or lower the temperature of the components. How effective should my daughter expect this "fix" to be?

I would monitor it with Core Temp which puts the temps in the System Tray and turns them yellow or red to warn you. Others like SpeedFan which allows auto-adjusting the fan speed in many cases, but requires copying it's .exe into the All Programs>Startup folder to put in System tray.

Check also for dust buildup in fan area, to clean it out this way:

and How To Clean Dust From Your Laptop - YouTube

Since you're a tech enthusiast also look over the steps for getting the vastly superior Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 since the Sony factory preinstall smothers Win7 with bloatware and duplicate conflicting utilities which have much better versions built into the OS. It's really the worst possible install one can have.

Until then I'd Clean Up Factory Bloatware.