cap lock flashes then laptop shuts down

Our laptop support has a Dell Latitude 800 Win xp pro sp2. the cap lock light flashes a few times and then the laptop shuts down. They have replaced the system board, ran mcafee, spybot and adware. All are clean.

Any ideas?

 

i did a very quick search on google for this. it might be that the laptop is going into either stand-by mode, or hibernate mode, and not actually shutting down, and this flashing of the light is informing you of this.

now, that was one (1) possible explaination.

here's another.

the battery may be defective, or the internal power supply adaptor is going bad.

i haven't seen this problem on any of the boards i frequent, so unfortunately this is all that i could find for now.

i would have thought that the owners manual should have some sort of explaination of this, or at least tech support would have known as well, but i guess over in "India" where tech support is, they haven't run into this either, or at least the books they read from haven't been updated yet either.

i'm surprised that "Juan" the Indian tech guy, didn't have too much knowledge.

 

I presume you mean that it happens while you are working in windows.
It could be a bios setting; say max thermal limit or voltage out of range. Normally they play a sound (like beethovens ninth symphony duh duh duh dah ) and then shut down. But it is possible that this flashing of the caps lock key is the "visible" alert and there is no internal peizo speaker.
(Dell Latitudes are known for heat production).

As Pro1Driver said, it could well be a power setting.

On old Optiplex,
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/opgx150/en/ug/problems.htm#msgs
Blinking yellow light meant power supply failure.