real problems re shutdown !!!!!!!!!!!!?

Question

I was in the middle of replying to an e-mail and my laptop just shut down, no warning, nothing. anyone able to help with what might be the problem or what i can do to fix it, cheers

Answer 1

I am guessing that it is not the battery, because i am sure that you were using a mains power supply right?? otherwise you would have guessed that it was the battery dying.

I would say that it is probably hardware.

firstly reseat (take it out and put it back in again, make sure power is off first) the memory on your laptop, if it is loose it may just shut down without warning.

next and probably the fault, check your fan, is it spinning, and are all the air vents on your laptop free from obstruction? Because if the CPU over heats it will automaticaly shut down imediately to stop you cooking the chip. (Sounds like advise gordon ramsey might say, lol). Find a diagnostic cd for your make of laptop and it will tell you if the fan is working ok.

Answer 2

The possibilities are... (as far as I can see):
1) Your laptop power supply has died and your laptop ran out of battery power. The failure might be in the power supply brick or in the main board of the laptop.
2) The laptop has burned out
3) The software has crashed. Badly.
4) Did it really shut down or is it just a screen failure?

How can you tell?
Does your laptop's battery have power level LEDs on it? Is it flat? If it's flat and won't charge up in your laptop can you borrow someone elses laptop to use as a charger for it? Can you borrow a charger to see if it makes yours work? That way you can identify if it's the charger brick that's burned out or the laptop. If charging the battery makes the laptop work again then it's a charger or motherboard fault. If using someone elses charger works then your charger is dead... otherwise you've got a faulty laptop. *** MAKE SURE that you use a matching charger otherwise you risk having a dead laptop anyway. ***

If you take out the battery for a couple of minutes and put it back in can you reboot your laptop? If you can then it's not PSU failure... it may be software or a transient fault in the hardware (like... something overheated and shut down but has recovered).My old Compaq does this occasionally (won't boot up... not the shutdown thing) because it's battery gets kind of screwy and makes the computer not startable.

If your laptop gets anywhere with booting up then shuts down again, try booting up from a 'live CD' or a boot diskette. If it works then your OS is messed up... reinstall it saving as much of your data as you can. If it doesn't boot up your laptop may be broken hardware

If your laptop hardare is burned out you may be able to get it repaired but it may be better to get a new one... you can move the disk from your existing one into the new laptop to get your data back (or get a shop to do it for you if you're not confident) but you may have some fiddling to do to get the old OS to boot up on the new laptop - which depends what OS the old laptop was running.

Answer 3

Need a new battery or power pack?