Last night, I dont know if I was dreaming, but I was awaken by my home PC shutting down, I know this becuase I heard the windows song -that tells you it is shutting down. I got so freaked out, so I got a butcher knife (in case someone was there - my dh works nights), and went to the room where the PC is at. There was noone or nothing and the computer looked like it was off, I leave the PC on and turn off the monitor each night, but when I checked I never checked the CPU to see if it was off, in the morning I went and pressed the CPU button and the computer shut down, so it never turned off at night. Well after checking every coner of the house along with the butcher knife, I went back to bed. Could I have been dreaming or could the computer shut down and turn on by itself?
2006-08-09 03:11:07 · 23 answers · asked by lightthenight 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Other - Computers
If you had automatic updates running there was a Microsoft patch released yesterday
your computer is probably set to install these and it required a reboot
sometime around 2AM????
2006-08-09 03:15:03 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 10⤊ 2⤋
I assume your windows did a shutdown. Most laptop PC users are aware that this happens regularly when you leave the pc unused for long time while it runs on battery. These are called power saving settings. It is possible that your power saving settings are configured to "hybernate" after the PC is inactive for some hours. However in case a PC is hybernating or is on standby it has not shut down. So when you switched it off in morning it did a proper shutdown.
Keep the butcher's knife at a safe distance in any case. call 911
2006-08-09 03:23:03 · answer #2 · answered by sumits1 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
There can be the possibility of power fluctuation or someone might have set the scheduler to shut down the pc at midnight time. Check out with task scheduler.
you can configure to stutdown the pc by itself using scheduler, but for startup you have to start manually unless some external device is used to wake up the pc power.
2006-08-09 03:21:31 · answer #3 · answered by ♥ forever 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
A power problem, either an outage, or an issue with the power supply, can cause a computer to shut down by itself, and sometimes reboot. Or some other issue with the OS crashing can cause a reboot too.
2006-08-09 03:14:54 · answer #4 · answered by Rjmail 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
If someone got a trojan horse into your computer they could take control of it. Here is a sight that can educate you on the threats of spyware and trojan horses (refered to as just trojans).
http://www.komando.com/downloads/categories.aspx?cat=Security
While you can only have one anti virus program at a time insalled on your computer- you can never have enough anti-spyware programs. I have five- Spy-bot search and Destroy, Ad-Aware SE, Spyware Blaster, Microsoft's Anti Spyware program and Spysweeper. The last one is the only one I paid for. The rest were free.
Here is a site where you can get free programs to download. Install and sweep your computer and you may be surprised how much got in through the web. Good luck and hope this helps.
http://www.download.com/Security-Spyware/2001-2023_4-0.html?tag=dir
2006-08-09 03:26:15 · answer #5 · answered by Coo coo achoo 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Yes check under "Power Settings" in the contorl pannel. A lot of computers will defulty shut down after a time period if the settings are not changed.
2006-08-09 03:15:26 · answer #6 · answered by ESPforlife 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
sure it is possible. It is on the bios. You can have it automatically set up to have it start up or shut down. Some bios let you do that. One of my old pentinum II also does the start up by itself. I have to disable it .
Just hit f2 or del or whatever your pc to go to bios and find option that will start up your computer, could be in one of the schedule or startup option, save it afterward
The other ways is unplug your power source all together.
However, you can network remote boot if you know the mac address which in your case you don't want to do that. Of course to automatic shut down is easier that start up (that is like software control) but automatic start up is either network remote boot or bios startup
2006-08-09 03:16:51 · answer #7 · answered by YourDreamDoc 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You have it backwards. Shut the computer down but leave the monitor on. And yes, the computer can shut itself down if there's a problem with windows.Or maybe a virus / malware problem...
2006-08-09 03:26:50 · answer #8 · answered by Vinegar Taster 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The computer may have a virus, or there is a problem with the hardware. I would run a good anti-virus program to scan your computer first. If it checks ok, I would have you check the hardware by an expert.
2006-08-09 03:15:42 · answer #9 · answered by EDDie 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The first thing that I would do is to run an anti-virus scan as well as an anti-spyware scan just to make sure that the nasties haven't gotten on your computer. There are other explanations for why the computer would act on its own, but I would do the scans first just to make sure things are okay.
2006-08-09 03:19:50 · answer #10 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Sometimes a computer can overheat and shut itself down, or you could have a virus on the comp which could be doing this as well.
2006-08-09 03:16:17 · answer #11 · answered by Ali Z 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋