Laptop powers off at random
- From: muraii@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 25 Jun 2006 10:11:38 -0700
Hi,
I'm looking into some problems with an HP Pavilion zt1130 for a friend.
The problem, generally, is that the thing shuts completely off at
apparently random times. I've been looking into this, and here are
some high level observations.
There doesn't seem to be a certain amount of time elapsed from boot
that the system tends to shut down. It has run for a few hours without
issue; and it has shut down during login (XP).
There doesn't seem to be a direct correlation to system overheating, as
it's never been noticeably hot --relative to laptop heat issues anyway.
Also, given the lack of a pattern of elapsed time noted, there are
times when it hasn't had a chance to heat up, and those when it
operates just fine long after it's reached peak or close-to-peak
temperature.
There doesn't seem to be a correlation to any particular access point
on the harddisk or other hardware. I ran some diagnostic tools (the
"eDiagnostics" HP bundles, as well as looking through Hardware
Manager), and aside from relatively minor suggestions, there weren't
any errors presented. CHKDSK did say it found some errors, but I've
run all over the harddrive so it doesn't seem that those bad blocks are
necessarily the culprit.
There *is* a shadow of a pattern to be found, though: when cold
booting, the machine seems to work perfectly fine; but upon reboot, it
begins flaking out. I'm going to test this a little more, but it holds
most of the time at least. I had it running for hours the other day,
with no issue, and I tried to keep at least a little CPU load on by
having Windows show a slideshow of an image folder. It wasn't until
the power was cut off (I had thought it might've been a flaky battery,
so I had it out to test) and the computer was then rebooted that 5
minutes afterward it flaked out.
Also, I ran it for a while a second time, from a cold boot a couple of
days later, and then rebooted (the right way), only to have the system
shut down a few minutes into booting up or right at login. Subsequent
attempts to get the system to work also tended to end in shutdown. A
couple of times, this happened while running the eDiagnostics stuff
before Windows had booted, so it doesn't seem to be an OS issue. Also,
while once or twice the system shut down while running a system-wide
search for image files--which tempted me to think it was some file
corruption or something--repeating said search precisely only resulted
in finding the thousands of image files on the harddisk.
Since it's worked pretty well with and without the battery, I'm led to
consider one of two things, primarily: RAM; or something shorting on
the system board. I would imagine that a short on the motherboard
would result in more regular flakiness--like either it works or it
doesn't. I know that memory, though, is a fickle beast, having had all
sorts of goofy stuff happen with bad RAM in the past.
Short of dropping some PC-133 laptop RAM in the thing, or tearing it
apart to see the motherboard, are there any other angles I should
consider? My friend has hinted that he doesn't really want to spend
much if anything to get the thing going, so $100 or so for 256MB fo
PC-133 might be a little steep for a 1.13 GHz Celeron machine, and
understandably so. Still, if that can be verified as the culprit, then
maybe we hunt for someone with spare memory or something and see how
that works out.
Thanks for any help.
Daniel
.
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