Just prior to Christmas, I received my new Sony Vaio. I messed about with the Windows 7 installation and borked it when trying to add Maverick to it. I then ran Maverick on it's own for a bit and then decided it might be useful to fix the dual boot thing working again. Second time lucky.
A few niggling bits and pieces were overcome, such as getting the trackpad to function. While looking through the syslog, I spotted this message:
intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: MCP power or thermal limit exceeded
appearing over and over. A quick search brought me to these pages:
http://www.ittidbits.com/blog/?p=422 & http://www.ittidbits.com/blog/?p=427
which gave me the courage to build my own kernel.
I thought I'd be clever and clone the kernel git repo, but building from the git repo didn't work. During the make install process, it kept creating a new "scripts/setlocalversion" file appending an "e" at the end as in "scripts/setlocalversione".
I resorted to downloading the linux-2.6.36.2 tarball and building from it, as per instructed in the original article.
This new kernel did, in fact, remove the repeated thermal limit warnings & give me control of the volume and screen brightness from the function keys.