Dell M60 shutting itself down

Hello everyone!

I did a ton of reading here and elsewhere, and it looks like there are many people experiencing spontaneous REBOOTS, and some that get blue screens, but my particular problem seems unique. If I missed the post that explains where the "don't randomly power off" checkbox is located, please, by all means, point me at it.

The #1 worst aspect of this particular problem is that it is random in terms of the timing of the power down. I have not found any particular one thing that seems to contribute to it.

About a week ago I did a fresh install with my corporate XP Pro, Office 2003, etc. (all fully licensed by the company I work for). I installed all my usual stuff and everything was working awesome. Then I noticed that an earlier problem I had had with my Dell M60 laptop came back - the conflict of the second IDE channel with the docking station. So then, here is the order of events as best I can reproduce them:

1. Computer has fresh install of all software, and seems to be running fine.

2. Works fine from Sunday (a week ago) through Friday morning - NOT A SINGLE PROBLEM.

3. I notice the 2nd IDE channel issue, notify work, they swap the motherboard (since that is the only known fix for the problem).

4. Computer seems fine, and the 2nd IDE channel issue is now gone after the motherboard swap

5. To prepare for a LAN party on Saturday, I begin installing game software.

6. I purchase the bronze halflife2 package on steam and install all its various games

7. All game installation goes perfect, including HOURS of installing software

8. I go to the LAN party, and to check things out, I go to play City of Heroes, a game I am very familiar with in terms of speed of drivers, and notice it is very jerky and unsmooth

9. I am currently running version 7590 of the nvidia xp drivers (obtained from 3dchipset) and decide to update to the "latest" from the nvidia site. Note that before the computer re-install, I was running version 6220 of their drivers. Even though I knew 6220 had worked in all of my games, I was hoping to find something newer.

10. Interestingly, NONE of the drivers from nvidia worked - they all reported that they didn't support the hardware in my computer. Even the quadro driver failed to work (I have a quadro fx go700 in my laptop)

11. I installed version 7590 on my computer, and all seemed to work well at that point in terms of games running with good speed.

12. I configure fraps so I can see frames per second in my games, and see that City of Heroes is working as I would expect it to.

13. I then proceed to attempt to play Halflife2 deathmatch, and begin noticing the periodic power downs. They seem to be ROUGHLY an hour or so apart.

14. The power downs SEEM to increase in frequency. They now feel like they occur every 30 to 60 minutes.

15. I try playing CoH for a while to see if it is perhaps a source engine problem, and CoH doesn't lock up after about 1.5 hours of playtime.

16. We switch to Counterstrike Source, and I have the problem still. I bear with it - just turning the computer back on after it turns itself off.

17. We switch to playing Battlefield Vietnam. The lockups transition to as often as every 3 to 10 minutes. I end up leaving the LAN party out of frustration.

18. I am now home, and am finding that the computer shuts itself down just in plain old desktop windows. The -*FIRST*- power on cycle today resulted in a power off immediately after logging in.

19. I disabled two utilities on the computer - speedswitchxp and i8kfangui. I was finally able to run part of a virusscan (each previous attempt resulted in a power down within 2 to 5 minutes of starting the virusscan). I thought the problem MIGHT be fixed.

20. About 25 minutes into the virusscan, the computer turned itself off again.

So in reading the posts here, I see that the usual drill is that people post 10 billion lines of stuff about what is running on their computer. I can go through that if that is the only way to get help, but I was hoping to get something a lot better.

Does anyone know of something (besides event viewer, which ain't helping here. . .) that might be able to tell me what specifically was running or happening just before a computer shuts itself off?

Or does anyone know of what would cause a COLD computer (ie - a NON overheating computer) to decide to just power itself off?

Thanks,

-Joe Chott

 

Must say, you've put a lot of work into this problem.
Is the following phrase telling us something ...?

About 25 minutes into the virusscan, the computer turned itself off again

Games can tax both man and machine. When they don't work, where do we start. When virus scan fell to the same problem, I think we can narrow our search (for now). It seems to be pointing to a hardware problem. I would consider changing / swaping memory cards, PSU, cooling supply for CPU.
One question, have you run the virus scan from safe mode? Try it an see if problem continues.

 

Looks like this is indeed a hardware issue. I had run the motherboard BIOS diagnostics successfully, but out of eight runs of the diagnostics just now, it died (turned itself off) six times during the memory portion of the test.

I think the memory must have gone bad somehow.

But since I am now able to trigger the problem fairly reliably OUTSIDE of windows, I can rule out the concept of it being a virus, trojan, sustained load issue, or anything like that.

Anyway - thanks for the help!

-Joe Chott

 

Hi Joe (welcolme to the BBS)

Not necessarily!
A memory diagnostics should report a... "problem with the memory ".

A problem with the virus scan would indicate a problem searching/scanning/communicating with the harddrive (which is what it does).

First, I would reseat the connections, particularly those of the HDD(s).

Let us know if there is any change.

Matt

 

Don't really think so; trojans can damage firmware outside windows.