My laptop powers off after latest windows updates

[Guest]

Okay, I had this same problem after the July windows updates, then the August
ones fixed it and now the September one has messed it up again.

My laptop running XP Pro SP2 simply powers off randomly. Right now, it's
doing it about every 5-15 minutes or so. It DOES NOT do it running in safe
mode (which I'm doing now), so I know it's not a hardware problem. It is also
not an overheating issue - it happens even if my computer has been shut down
all night. It does to it starting in VGA mode - but NOT in safe mode.

I tried uninstalling the updates and that didn't help - thinking they
changed some dll or other files that it doesn't uninstall? Tried updating my
display drivers (ATI Radeon 9700 series) - also didn't help. In July it did
it primarily when I opened any games (which is what made me think to try
display driver updates), but now it's doing it no matter what I'm doing even
when I have nothing but windows running.

Also in July, I had to totally power down my motherboard in order to get the
system to restart. Don't have to do that now - it restarts right away...just
powers down again after 10 minutes or so.

Any ideas? I did some searching on the web but couldn't find any mention of
this.

FYI, my laptop is a ProStar 3722 with 1 gig Ram, 512k video ram, 80 gig HD,
and the Radeon 9700 series graphic card. I run McAfee anti-virus as well if
that helps (and don't know if it's related, but every time I restart the
system, my windows firewall turns itself off)

 

[Guest]

It sounds like it's a software problem, but we can't totally rule out
overheating as a suspect as the type of overheating you're talking about
would be a power supply overheating. If the CPU overheats then there might
not be a noticable increase in temperature and a lot of moterboards today
have CPU overheating protection built into them. This shuts the computer down
if the CPU overheats. The most common cause for a CPU to overheat is because
a cooling fan fails. Check your fans to see if they start spinning after you
turn your computer on.

In the case of software get and run these to remove harmful software:
Ad Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad-aware_se_personal.php
Spybot: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
Windows Defender:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

If these don't work then try to do a System Restore to a time before you
started having this problem.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/systemrestore.mspx

-Dan