Thanks for all your replies. I'll call ASI to see what they tell me.
It's one of those "sleek" Sony Vaio laptops that are impossible to open. It's been shutting off by itself, and I believe it has to do with the CPU fan. A friend of mine cleaned the fan but it still shuts down unexpectedly. To make matters worse, all these shutdowns have caused the OS to go into recovery mode every time it's turned on. I wanted to reformat but we don't have the DVDs that came with it. The laptop's a mess.