Laptop turning off by itself. What could be the problem???

Nadia

Hi. This is my first post to the techie board. I hope someone can help me out with this problem. I have a Sony Vaio laptop that is 2 years old. It has been functioning very well until suddenly 2 months ago it has started turning off on its own especially when I'm in the middle of doing something important.

This has been occurring at shorter durations over the past couple of weeks. At first this happened if the laptop had been in use for a long time but now it is happening after less than 15 minutes. It is very frustrating. Does someone know what this problem could be?? Battery, motherboard, processor or something else. Please help.

Piggybanker

Hi

It's a pain when that happens! I'm not especially techy but my 15mth old laptop did the same thing earlier this year and it turned out that I needed a new hard Disk (got one for £40ish from PC World - cheaper if you search on line and pick up in store as you get the online price and don't pay postage). Luckily my OH diagnosed the problem by swapping various parts out of his laptop - without that I'm not sure how you can check for certain what's wrong.

Sorry not to be able to be definite but thought I'd let you know what the prob with mine was.

Good luck

wiraone

Most probably it is overheated. Check if the fan is working .. if it noisy all the time, most probably there is a dust built-up either on the fan or the heatsink. Get an air duster from Maplin and use it to remove the dust .. You may want to open up the heatsink cover to remove the dust built-up on the heatsink.

smcicr

first guess would be heat as noted by wiraone above but to be honest it could be multiple things...definitely worth checking the heat issue out - i presume Motherboard Monitor will work on laptops (?) might be worth installing that as it should show not only the temperature internally but also what speed the fan is running (if at all) - freeware, download here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=311

Good luck.

Nadia

wiraone wrote:

Most probably it is overheated. Check if the fan is working .. if it noisy all the time, most probably there is a dust built-up either on the fan or the heatsink. Get an air duster from Maplin and use it to remove the dust .. You may want to open up the heatsink cover to remove the dust built-up on the heatsink.

Thanks to everyone who has replied. Now for the silly question. What's a heatsink and heatsink cover ?

wiraone

Nadia wrote:

Thanks to everyone who has replied. Now for the silly question. What's a heatsink and heatsink cover ?

Check this guide:

http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=258

Check where the fan is, flip over your notebook and most probably you'll find the fan/heatsink cover. Use proper screw driver to open up the cover.

coolsteel

My laptop was shutting down on its own accord, it was a overheating problem so i bought a cooling fan from Maplins and that cured the problem for me.
Coolsteel:cool:

HKP_2

Might not be hardware related....Some machines have a feature that says 'if I have a critical error - reboot'. This is configurable as a bios setting. I had this problem. Turned out to be a corrupted systems file. A quick rebuild fixed the problem. Worth checking before forking out on new hardware, dont you think?

Nadia

I would like to thank everybody who has contributed to this thread. Would have liked to press the Thanks Button but it's AWOL at the moment. I will try to see if the problem is due to overheating as suggested by several MSErs then take it from there. Cheers.