my husband and i have been experienceing random shut down on our computer. there are no warnings and no error messages. the computer seems to run fine after you turn it back on. i believe it always occurs when we are connected to the internet, i don't know if that has anything to do with it or not. we always do a virus scan after the incident but nothing ever turns up. we are running XP home version, we keep all current updates and use norton antivirus software (also updated regularly). the computer itself is a Sony Vaio, only 6 months old. can anyone suggest a fix or a reason for this odd behavior?
You say "shut down"... Is it rebooting, or staying off? if it is rebooting,
sure it could be an overheating problem, but it can also another hardware
problem or a software problem. If it is rebooting, try enabling the "blue
screen of death", This is a screen with a blue background that reports what
program crashed.. I myself had a hardware conflict that was very
intermittent. (Like once every couple of days to 4 or 5 days sometimes - an
additional 512 RAM stick I added was bad).
Turning on the blue screen of death:
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As you probably know, many computer problems are just momentary glitches and
are solved by simply rebooting. So, Microsoft ships WinXP set to
"Automatically reboot" on "System failure". This often cures the problem,
but when it doesn't, we are left with no clues unless we know how to read
and interpret the Event Log. :>(
You can change this default setting. Go to System Properties | Advanced |
Startup and Recovery Settings. Remove the check from the Automatically
restart box. Next time, instead of rebooting, you computer should halt with
a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) full of codes. Post those codes here and
somebody should be able to interpret them and point you in the right
direction.
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....D.
