Laptop and it's annoying habit

[Delta]

PK, I need your help here.

I have an Acer Aspire 5003WLMi laptop, she's a wonderful little thing, just over 12 months old, but she has a really annoying habit.

That being that without warning or anything, she just switches off, no shut down or anything like that, just OFF, when you reboot there is no rude messages about having not shut down properly or anything like that.

Also there is no significant 'thing' that makes it happen. She can go weeks, even months without a problem and then she plays up on me. At weekend it happened twice while trying to run Spybot. And has happened twice this morning.

Any idea what this may be? After the weekend's performance I have run Adaware, cleared my temp internet files, and deleted all my cookies.

I run Avast and Zonealarm, and they seem to be ok and not giving any warnings of anything, but this was also happening when I was running with AVG.

Any help greatfully received, or do I just submit to this being one of those little random features that makes it unique?

[Paule]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

Lets start with some basics, if you think they are patronising you can hit me next time we meet,
but some people dont check the obvious. A friend of mine played Hell with Virgin cos her phone line wasnt working, she eventually got them to send an engineer round who simply plugged her phone into the Virgin phone socket and voila..she had plugged it into the old BT socket.

Ok,
Does this happen when you are running off the Battery only, or does this also happen when you are running off the mains as well.

If it is just going OFF and not shuttin gdown, it sounds like a power fault


PKea

[Paule]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

Also can you tell me what type of programs you are running when it shuts off, you can PM me with these if you want, as this may be a CPU overheating issue possibly

[Delta]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

I tend not to run it off the battery that much as the batt only has a life of an hour and half, if I am onlin chatting to someone and I want a fag/brew I take the laptop into the kitchen and run it off the battery then.

It does spend most of it's life plugged in to the main, I do allow the battery to run completely down and I have been known to take the batt out and run with just mains (not good cos the lappy rocks then!)

It's not the power cable, the kids have the same laptops (but not the same problem) and it all depends where I am sat in the room as to which power cable is plugged in (one near my desk, one near my armchair)

And it is just OFF, there is no windows shutdown and windows doesn't seem to register that the system went off with no shutdown (I just dont get that rude message saying that the sytem was not shut down properly blah blah)

[Delta]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

Next question, the only things usually running are Office Outlook, Msn Live Plus and Windows IE7. I tend not to play games or anything like that on it, so its is usually just email and internet, MSN when I am working.

[Paule]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

OK, next time it goes kaputt, feel underneath to see if its red hot,
also if you can look at the fan vents on the laptop to see if they are blocked or full of dust etc.

[Delta]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

It does run hot most of the time, I menetioned this to the guy in the shop and he says that he has the same one and he can't use it on his lap, the hot air comes out the side, and I take great pains not to blocked that, but it does get hot underneath. The kids' laptops do the same, it just seems to be mine that switches off.

Thanks for your help so far, I think that I am going to turn it off and give it a bit of clean.

Back later (hopefully)

[Delta]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

Oh for god sake! just turned it off to give it a wee sweep over with a brush, so it's all nice and clean now, but is now minus two keys!

I was putting it on the dining room table to clean, had been making some jewellery previously, so put the laptop down, went to pick all the jewellery makign stuff up and dropped my pliers on the key board, have managed to mangle my insert and delete keys, and break the little clippy things underneath, so they won't go back on. Still work if you press the little nipple thing!

So it's back on my desk, and is staying there with an external keyboard plugged in, gonna take to my pc shop to price up a repair on the keyboard!

Flippin computers!

[Glenn UK]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

fwiw my daughter spilt tea on my laptop and it ruined they keyboard.

bought a replacement onlie and fitted ity myself, if you arte game for this then do a search for laptop bits and see wjhat the cost is, i think mine was £66.00 Mines an Acer Travel mate 660.

HTH

Glenn

[Delta]

Re: Laptop and it's annoying habit

Well she seems to be behaving herself again now, so that's good, never realised till tonight how much I actually use the delete button! Going to have a word at the pc shop and see what they say, the boss did say today on the phone that they may be able to do the two buttons, or they may have to replace the keyboard totally, he said he can't say till he sees it.