Arrgh!

[jethrien]

That's the second time today that my computer has spontaneously shut itself off! No warning, no blue screen, it just suddenly reboots! One second I'm in the middle of composing an email, the next I'm staring at the little flying Windows icon as it starts up again! WTF?

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

...do you think this might be related to you zapping your computer into unconsciousness the other day?

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Possibly! Who knows?

The tech guy is baffled. Apparently, there's no record of the computer having any kind of fault or unexpected shutdown.

[shnayder.livejournal.com]

Might be overheating... see if it feels hot. Alternatively, might be gremlins.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

It's always run hot. It's my first laptop (and it's a bit on the elderly side), so I'm not sure what the temp's supposed to be. But it's not running any hotter now than it was six months ago.

[tigermelp.livejournal.com]

Also, if it IS an IBM laptop (and it happens to be from SCI your freshman year), we have the same computer...and you may want to back up all your data, just in case. Those laptops eat hard drives like crazy.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

It is an IBM laptop. It isn't from SCI - this is my work laptop. Fortunately, I keep almost nothing on this harddrive - all my work's saved to the company servers.

[tigermelp.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. Yeah, if it's an older IBM model (mine is a T22), they do eat the hard drives...which could also be causing blips like you're experiencing.

Once, my computer froze on me and wouldn't boot for like, a month. I took it in to get fixed (and to get the data recovered, because I assumed that the hard drive got eaten again), and when I got it back, it was all intact. It just stopped booting for a month, for no reason...and was fine after they "reset" it which was probably just taking out the battery for a little while and maybe running it through some power cycles.

[tigermelp.livejournal.com]

I second Victor's suggestion of overheating.

Is it an IBM laptop? (I guess I picture people working on IBM laptops because that's what I have at home.)

I've had mine spontaneously reboot a couple of times, and that was either due to heat or to power supply issues. You may want to try (after grounding yourself, of course) turning it off, unplugging it, removing the battery, letting it all cool down a bit, and reassembling it. That usually tends to resolve power supply trouble (and gives it a nice little cool-down period if it's too hot).

[dushai.livejournal.com]

Another possibility to consider: Bad connection from power supply to motherboard. (The bad news is that this is a diagnosis which is a real pain to confirm or refute.)

[freekofnature.livejournal.com]

Another possibility to consider is memory gone bad. An intermittent would cause the problem you are experiencing. A static discharge could cause this. Run the memory test on the diagnostic CD for a day to confirm.

[lyriendel.livejournal.com]

Or it could be the motherboard. Michael's desktop was doing exactly the same thing. We thought it was overheating, so we reseated the heat sink a few times, which did nothing. Eventually its power supply died, which we then assumed had been the problem, so we gave it a new power supply. But it still spontaneously rebooted. So we took out a shorting sound card (that had killed the power supply), which also failed to fix the problem, replaced the RAM, still broken, finally had to buy a new motherboard. Alas, his processor was too old to work with nearly any modern motherboards, so we ended up building him an entirely new computer. :)