Well, there was an issue with laptops shipping with an HM versus NM chipset, one of them can take i3 and above CPUs, as well as Core-based Pentium and Celeron, the other one, was limited to Pentium and Celeron CPUs ONLY.
If you attempted to upgrade a laptop with the "limited" chipset, to an i3, or above, it would shut down every 30 minutes.
Is that approximately what's happening here?
Or is it more along the lines, of every time you go to run a program, you get a BSOD or Reboot or something? Could be a bad HDD, or a power issue then. (Maybe RAM or GPU too.)