Windows 7 Desktop PC shuts down 15 minutes after being powered on

RumRat

Lee_Howden wrote: »

Is there any way to prove if this is the case?

If this is the case, it is quite puzzling. The PC is mainly doing day to day stuff when the the Shutdown warning comes on. On one occasion, my wife had powered it on whilst she was getting ready for work and had just logged into Windows 7. There was only an Internet browser open

Download and run 'Core Temp' to check your temps and Tj max

atrixblue.-MFR-.

My recommendation here is to remove side wall cover and check fans (make sure your outside the warranty period for the PC manufacturer or it will void any warranty), depending on age of the CPU, age of heatsink, periods its has been cleaned out, you may have to replace thermal paste as it does degrade to the point it becomes ineffective and you experience random shutdowns when the system is under load, so when a browser is selected to be opened the CPU heats up higher than normal and then your hitting TJ max and thus thermal protection is enabled that shuts the PC down, or its simply blue screens known as a BSOD.


I think your anti virus is a red herring, to the problem, this sounds like its the a physical hardware issue and starting at the temps is the best place to start as its the most common. even a failing memory will cause this, windows may show a memtest ok, but the slightest tap the system tower could cause it to suddenly crash the system.


I would go out and buy the least expensive. thermal paste, replace this on the CPU heatsink, and see if it cures, if not then remove each memory module 1 at a time booting up inbetween to find out if 1 stick is causing a crash. if not then onto GFX cards, if not that having the CPU tested this would require a PC shop test station.

bsod

It doesn't do it in safe mode, does a clean shutdown, no mention of a reason in the event log, and does it after 15 minutes (what does that mean, always, 15 minutes of inactivity?) therefore it's a software problem, nothing to do with thermal paste or heatsinks or psu's or hard disks or ram.

memtest never shows any errors, ram testing is something from a era gone by, when people threw ram around on nylon carpets.

A shutdown /a from the cmd prompt will abort the shutdown, if you're quick.

Re-install will be faster than following a 100 dead ends, you could try a less traumatic system restore first, if this started recently.

Viruses can do forced shutdowns sometimes, because it stops you fixing them - the last one I saw that did this, went through all the network shares and local drives corrupting every mp3 and jpgs beforehand, something you may wish to take into account if all your data is still held only on a nas.

Thermal paste solutions are for bodged home or dodgy sidestreet shop builds - if this happens to be one of those, most overheating issues can be avoided by changing the power management settings - ie passive system cooling policy and reduced max processor state to below 100% - results in a much quieter machine too.

Lee_Howden

I think I've found the cause of the problem. Having tested all the Hardware, including running the PC with the side off to see if the fans were cutting out (which they weren't), I then looked into the Windows Updates. I rolled back to a restore point from a month ago and have found that the PC is no longer doing it. I'm now going through the batch of updates and reinstalling them one by one to see if I can now recreate the problem and narrow which one is the culprit.

Thanks for the advice everyone. It has been really helpful.

Lee_Howden

Unfortunately, this problem has returned once I started to add the Windows Updates back in. So I'm now stuck as to what to do as the PC is more or less unusable in this condition.

I'm now looking to completely reload the PC from scratch. However, I'm in a quandary about what to do with the other partitions. The valuable data is on a separate partition and I don't really want to lose it. Can I reload Windows 7 without affecting the other partition?

Le_Kirk

Go back to your restore point and then don't do the windows updates until you are prompted by Micro$oft. You should be able to reload an O/S on a partition without affecting the other partition. How long after running in your "restored" condition before adding back updates? That is always a problem when fault finding (especially intermittent faults) how long do you wait until it "never happens again?"