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Computer turning itself off when idle

G

Gustavus

Golden Member
A couple of years ago I built a computer for a neighbor who wanted only to browse on net, send and receive e-mails and play simple casino-like games. Windows XP, Zone Alarm firewall and Norton Systemworks (ugh!) for AV and AS. I have had to do some simple maintenance on it from time to time, but now it is doing something that has me mystified. She said that when she was reading e-mails and left the machine for a short time, she came back to find it off -- blank monitor with the LED on. She rebooted only to get the Windows bootup interrupt saying Windows had been turned off improperly etc. It has done this several times in the last few days.I assumed that something had gotten changed so that either the monitor was blanking after some period of inactivity or that the machine was hibernating and that she had powered down before rebooting. Turns out that that was not the case, the computer was doing a hard power down, and the monitor was going blank in the absence of a video signal. Her UPS is not a smart UPS so has no provision for a power down and has no communication with the computer, nor has any change been made in the BIOS. There are no screen savers and the system is not programmed to go into hibernation.

Bottom line is that a computer has for no apparent reason started doing a hard power down -- seemingly correlated with inactivity.

Any ideas would be much appreciated. NAV doesn't detect anything, but there could be a bit of malware behind it -- but I don't know any that does this.
 
Sounds like it could be overheating.

Even though it is idle, it is still gradually building up heat, and if the heatsink is completely clogged with dust and fluff it will get too hot to stay on. I have seen this a few times, some heatsinks are just fluff hooks.

I suggest opening the box and giving the heatsink a clean. I usually remove the fan and heatsink completely to clean them but you can clean it to a decent extent while it's all insitu.

Good luck
 
mulletgut,

Thanks for the replies. Sorry I didn't acknowledge the first one at the time. I had done a lot of searching on net at tech sites and was also convinced it had to be heat related -- either the fan on the CPU cooler was slowing or stopping which would trigger a shutdown even before the CPU got hot, or the cooling stack -- fan and heatsink -- were no longer keeping the CPU below the shut down temperature. But the computer is at their home so I hadn't had a chance to examine it in person. Over the weekend she bought Norton AV 2007 at Best Buy (the subscription period for the Norton Systemworks I installed had expired in December) and asked me to come by to uninstall the old one and to install the new.

I did that yesterday. I ran their computer for several hours and could not duplicate the failure. It is still possible that it has a sticky fan that is about to go out -- but until I can duplicate the crowbar shutdowns she has seen, there is little point in guessing about it. I am going to install Speedfan for her and ask that she occasionally notice the temperature and fan speed it is reporting. If she happens to see a fan speed drop or a temperature spike just before one of the shutdowns, that will prove what the problem is. I will post a final comment here if it does.
 
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