Radom shut downs

[Blue Demon]

My brother's laptop keeps randomly shuttikng down for no reason...any ideas what it could be?

[sadio8]

The obvious questions such as a possible virus infection.

Try booting in safemode and see if it randomly shuts down..... what programs load on startup?

Download and install this in safemode....

http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php


to a quick and/or full scan... see what happens

[G]

overheating

[El Fangel]

Power supply also, mine did it for awhile when the PS was burning out.

[Jura]

Probably some sperm made it's way into the laptop and crusted up the cpu fan.

[Triple A]

Yeah, something is overheating. Normally I would say to try to replace the power supply and see if that fixes it, but I have done that and the problem still persisted, so it was something else overheating. Also real annoying with a laptop.

[Beauser]

Depending on the brand, it could be the thermal gel on the processor/mb.

A few years ago, Dell put out a ton of laptops with CRAP thermal cooling compound, and it dried up/evaporated quickly. If you're tech savvy, you can pull it out, clean it off, sand it down a bit, and reapply new thermal compound for less than $20.

[The Mackem]

I would check out sadio's response first. My gf's laptop was doing the same and it was just a virus.

[Bad Company]

The easiest way to see if it's overheating is to make sure it's on a flat surface, pref a table. Despite the fact it's a laptop, try not to run it on a a bed, lap etc as that will trap heat. Put a spacer under the back of laptop to allow the exhaust heat to escape, you should be able to tell where it is by the vents on the bottom, Don't cover these vents. Same thing goes if it's the intake on the bottom, it's the same thing, use the spacer (Books work pretty well) to create a gap to let fresh air in.

Core Temp. http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/ Should show you how hot things are getting. And to stress the laptop run Prime95 http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm it will force your processor to run at 100%. From there you can tell if it's a hardware issue (overheating) or if doesn't crap out, it'll likely be a software issue (Virus, as stated above).