A friend's Dell Latitude laptop keeps suddenly shutting off 10-15 minutes into usage and I have done the following to try and fix it but to no avail...

1) I installed a fresh copy of XP but about 10 minutes into usage, the laptop still shuts off.

2) I changed out the harddrive and the laptop still shuts off in about 10 minutes.

3) Checked the adapter/power source and tried it on a different laptop and no problem.

4) Checked the internal fan and there doesn't seem to be an overheating problem.

Not sure what is causing it to shut off like that? What is left to check? Could it be the CMOS is bad? Does that even effect whether it remains on or off?

Thoughts anyone?

11/21/2007 11:37:13 AM

In Administrative Tools under control panel check out the event viewer. Look under system and application events. You might be able to find some errors there if there is some serious issues. If not you could always try like a live cd and see if it will run for a while. If it does you know it is a software problem, otherwise it is a hardware problem. Also, on a linux live cd you could tail the messages file and check for errors.

11/21/2007 11:56:27 AM

I narrowed down the problem....turns out it was shutting off after it tried to invoke current date/time.

Thanks, man. That was helpful!

11/21/2007 3:31:51 PM

No problem, thats what 2 years of working at a small company will do where you had to do sysadmin and desktop support stuff in addition to development.

11/21/2007 10:33:41 PM