Laptop crashes with no BSOD

[Seamack]

So after having Sony Vaio VPCF11M1E laptop for 2 years it has started randomly crashing in the last week.

The crashes seem to occur randomly from 5-30 minutes after startup.

It does not seem to crash in safe mode but it will in safe mode with networking.

Initially thought it could be a virus so ran a scan and it was clean, then i did a clean install of windows 7 Ultimate x64 and the problem still persists.

Specs:

Intel® Core™ i5-520M Processor

4Gb RAM

NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 330M GPU

(Not sure if I quoted the right specs but this is the full list:
http://www.sony.co.uk/product/vaio-f-series/vpcf11m1e-h

I am really at a loss as to what i should do next. Any help would be much appreciated

 

[Saga Lout]

Any signs of overheating? Does it restart a last half an hour again? Does it crash in Safe Modewith Networking if the cable is disconnected and the wi-fi turned off?

 

[Seamack]

The model is infamous for its bad air circulation but it doesn't feel hot when it does crash.

After crashing it does not restart. There is no error screen or message, the screen just turns black and the fan turns off as though its lost power.

Tried it again a few times with safe mode and without safe mode, it seems like it crashes when it tries to do any kind of complex task. When it is idling on the desktop it did not seem to ever crash. I think this is the reason why it doesn't crash in safe mode. However i then tried to do some updates and with a few minutes it turned off.

 

[Saga Lout]

When you start it up, press Control, Shift and Escape togeter to bring up the Task manager. Double click the heading of the CPU column to bring the high resource users to the top of the list.

Watch carefully while you start new processes to see if anything spikes the figures. When it crashes, restart, press the Windows key and R together to brin gup the Open box. Type msconfig and press Enter. Click eth StartUp tab and untick everything, click Apply and OK. Restart with no programes coming on automativcally. See if that makes a difference. Remember - you need to be careful because you just prevented your AV utility from running.

 

[Seamack]

So i tried to do some windows updates and the CPU stayed around 15%, the odd spike to 40%, when it eventually crashed there didnt seem to be any warning.

I had just reinstalled windows a few days ago and due to the crashing couldnt install any programs so msconfig>startup did not have any programs in.

I did notice on device manager that it could not update drivers for "base system drive" and "Network Controller." Could this be the cause?

 

[Saga Lout]

Network Controller probably refers to the wireless side - so long as Ethernet Adapter has drivers and you can get online, that isn't important yet. Base System device might be crucial. Right click it and go to Properties then click Details and scroll to HardwareIDs and take a note of the four characters which follow VEN for Vendor and also the four following DEV for Device.

Go to http://www.pcidatabase.com and input those characters in the two relevant boxes and follow the trail to the right driver. When you find the list of the Vendor's drivers, they aren't in order so use your browser's Find facility to track the Device details. With luck you'll have an executable file but some will be a zipped folder.