unexpected pc shutdowns.

thistleboon

I have an emachine 210, which has suddenly developed an annoying habit of shutting down without any warning whatosever! When this occurs, the screen goes dead and in fact thinks the machine has been switched off, the keyboard is out of action, but the hard drive indication light remains on.
Looking in the device manager window, there is no indication of a problem.
The graphics are built in, but I have recently installed an ATI Radeon 9250 board.

Anybody got any experience of this or any ideas how to fix or diagnose the problem please?

scheming_gypsy

could be the psu.

intel

Recentlly happened to my Brothers and it was the PSU as S_G says.

wonderfullife_2

Hi
This use to happen to my old machine, and I think it was the memory, not really sure though, it was a long time ago. But what I remember is that I want to System, Advanced, Startup and Recovery, Settings and unticked Automatically restart, and then you get the error message, so you can find out more about the problem.

thistleboon

Ok thanks for that, I've changed it so I will wait and see what happens.

thistleboon

Sounds distinctly possible, but the "hard disk drive in operation" light remains on and the green system operating light changes to amber.

brummybloke

if it has only started happeneing since your gfx card was installed it would tend to suggest that is where the problem is.

have you got the latest drivers for that gfx card?, have you checked your windows update for any hardware updates?

i had a problem simular to this after i installed some pplive software to watch premier league games not shown on uk tv. i had to uninstall the software and use the windows xp repair feature.

it was pretty much each time i tried to watch any streaming video.

Darksun

Could be a problem with the graphics card, try removing it and see if you still get the problem.

It could also be an issue related to overheating, are you overclocking your CPU or Graphics Card? If so, make sure you have sufficient cooling in your machine.

John_Gray

It sometimes happens that an error message is placed in the System Event Log (viewed via Event Viewer, Start -> Run then type eventvwr and click on OK, then double-click on System). Look for messages just lower down from "eventlog" in the source column. They may have a red symbol at the front.

On the other hand, there may be nothing!

John

thistleboon

Thank you for the information, I did as you suggested, there was an enormous list of warnings, then error messages all relating to the cd drive. I need to note the time it next crashes, then I can review the list and hopefully, it will give me some idea of the error. Thanks again for that.

thistleboon

I haven't overclocked the machine, the shutdowns seem to be absolutely random! Thanks for your input.