We had a request to repair a laptop randomly shutting down without any big explanation of exactly what caused it, we suspected a potential faulty power supply that was switching off randomly.
Upon arrival the laptop seemed to be working well, so I got started by checking the error logs to see what has been happening over the past week – checking for reports of the shutdown happening. The power supply looked fine.
I noticed a few random errors and what looked like the laptop restarting unexpectedly, though there was no evidence of why. So I did a cleanup of malware, spyware and viruses to see if it was being caused by some software.
I then noticed the heat and it was running quite hot so I had a look at the fans on the laptop and blew some air in there to free if up a bit if it was clogged.
After this I kept thinking about the possible overheating and installed a heat monitoring program (Realtemp). I then saw it go up to 95 degrees across all 4 cores and suddenly the power was off and the screen was black. Aha! Problem found!
The next step was to double check that the problem was repeatable, sure enough when I ran a stress test the heat crept up and up. This time I stopped it and allowed it to cool down before the shut-off temp (96 degrees i think).
If this computer was under warranty we would have sent it back for repair, as they shouldn’t overheat under normal conditions which it was. As it wasn’t under warranty I propped it up with some rulers in the office and recommended a laptop riser pad with fans built in to keep it cool. Problem solved with a happy customer =)
The customer also had another computer which was full of junk, so we took it away to backup all of the data and do a fresh re-install of windows (clean it up).
Leave a Reply