M6809 on battery sometimes just shuts down - Page 3

It's happening a lot now on battery and AC. I'm out of warranty now. I had what I thought was some success by disabling the Broadcom card but it eventually shut down on me. Holding it in the BIOS on boot for a couple of minutes seems to work somewhat.

Not happy. Makes it unuseable in the car or on the road.

Just to reaffirm lwgray's experience, the first time I booted today the fan fired up literally less than five seconds after I pressed the power button -- I think it was even before the bios screen appeared. This is not a software problem.

I don't know. I have the problem occuring at least once a week, and I've had no wireless problems. Also, I live in Arizona and there is absolutely no humidity here. The problem happens on and off battery, and both immediatly after boot and after a few hours. It can't just be simple too much heat, because I've ran UT2004 many times without problem (and I played it on my lap). It is something more complex, because during these times, the fan goes on high speed just fine. But sometimes it doesn't and it shuts off. I just don't know what the problem is, however I will go through all the "user accessable" spots and clean them. I want a solution soon...

Great news. Good Luck.

Just wondering -- Are you still under the 12 month warranty or did you purchase an extended from Emachines? They're not issuing a Limited Warranty RMA outside the warranty period are they?

it's great that somebody is trying to solve this problem. it's really embarassing when you turn on the laptop to show some cool stuff to your friends or boss and then the thing starts shutting down randomly.
i replaced the cpu<>cooler paste, by the way, - didn't change a thing.

Thanks. Sounds like either way they'll consider it a warranty job. Looks like I'll have to get mine fixed through my BB ESP -- I've just been waiting until someone detects/confirms exactly what is the problem/solution. I'd prefer not to have BB do the detecting, which surely would start with a fruitless/inconvenient drive reformat and software reinstall...

Well, I have three or so more weeks before my warranty expires - and this has been happening to me as well - started couple of days ago btw... happens only when I try to return from hibernation - and the funny thing is that it happened more often after I installed a 512 MB Samsung SODIMM module (remember that the older PC2700 SODIMMS are also Samsung).

This boggles my mind why would it go bananas on me right before my warranty expires. I also gotta go to a trip to Russia on july 11th - if I turn it in - will they have it ready by then??

Here's a wonderful new development...

If I'm on AC and I'm playing a 3D graphic intensive game with a lot of disk access, the fan will blow HOT air out the vent. The top left area under the laptop will be VERY warm. I wouldn't want the computer sitting on my lap...
I also notice this when I'm doing a virus check of the whole C drive. Things really heat up.

So, these laptop computers normally do get pretty warm under heavy use... I'm hoping that the fact that your machine was hot was because of usage and not a defective temp sensor. Hopefully the machine is still under warrantee and eMachines can check it out.

I still usually see this problem on power up (1 in 5 boot ups?). After it's running, my machine is stable and won't power off. I've gotten into the habit of booting to the bios for a few minutes then booting the OS...

Mark

Clutching for straws here...Is anyone using Avast antivirus and having this issue? I have been getting some wierd behavior with it and I know it has a module that loads before the OS or somehow scans the bootsector.

Anyway today I got a wierd one. It did shut down on battery but the fan started (at high speed) and stopped three times before coming on full whack and shutting down.

To summarize -
95% of my shutdowns are on battery
I can usually solve it by booting into BIOS for a minute. Fixes it 90% of the time - for now.
I accidently put my lappy in my bag w/o hibernating it and it ran fine for an hour. It was very hot but did not shut down. Not heat related?
I sat it on top of an AC vent allwoing the air to pass and it DID shut down. Again - not heat related.

Same issue with Gateway 7405gx

I'm having the same issue with my notebook, I can play CS:S for hours then decide to check some of my daily sites and get the full fan speed and shutdown. I've removed and reapplied thermal paste, once with cheap thermal compound once with artic silver 5. After application problem seems to go away for a few days but problem occured one week after last application. Clean install of XP Pro, AMD 64 drivers updated, tried the battery drain, and as far as bios there aren't any gateway updates. Getting ready to take back to best buy for problems with reboot when plugging in my ac adapter. Funny thing, when I pulled the heat sink off, it had scratches and a finger print on the bottom of heatsink and I'm the only owner of this notebook. Any thoughts are appreciated.

All my shutdowns have come on ac power, rarely run on battery.

If I was to theorize, I would go with a faulty temperature sensor. It makes sense with the symptoms. The fan suddenly goes on at high speed without any notice or any slow throttling, and boom it turns off. It would seem that the sensor forgot to report the right temperature and then suddenly finds the right one and says "oh crap" and shuts down. Of course, that still does not solve the problem...

Ok, today I got so frustrated by three shutdowns before the Windows fully loaded that I decided to try BigSteve's solution of booting to the bios to let the system "warm up." But a seemingly strange thing happened -- within just a few minutes (less than 5 minutes) of sitting idle on the bios screen the fan kicked in at normal speed with no shutdown. Then again tonight I booted the system first to the bios and within about 3 minutes the fan started.

Am I wrong or does this seem rather unusual? Under normal booting to Windows I can use the system for low CPU usage tasks (e.g. Internet surfing) for a half hour or more (assuming no shutdowns) before the cooling fan kicks in, yet within just a few minutes sitting idle on the bios screen from a cold boot the fan starts up. Very strange...

Yet more evidence of a faulty heat sensor?

My machine usually kicks the fan on at a low level 1-2 min's after booting. The main reason being is that CPU and disk activity are fairly high at this point. I don't think this is a problem.

My #1 guess to this problem is still a bug in the bios. That the bios should be discarding initial bad data or it's not initializing the port that reads the temperature data properly.

My second guess is a flakey or unreliable hardware circuit. This may be due to a poor design or a bad component.

Mark

Ok, I finished reading through the pages of this thread and I'm going to post my experience with this.

Running a M6809 laptop

First install: XP Pro, SP1. Antivirus: Norton 2004. Firewall: Sygate Personal Firewall, ATI 9600 OC'd 5%.
After owning the laptop for 3 months, I started to experience this shutdown issue. It started out on battery. I would put the system to sleep while plugged in. Then wake the system on battery power. In about 20 seconds, fans kick in and laptop shuts down. A few months later, it started doing it every time I woke it up, sometimes twice.

Current install: XP x64. Antivirus: Avast 4.6 Firewall: Windows built in firewall, no OC.
I have yet to have the problems now. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I haven't had any bizarre shutdowns since I installed x64. This heavily confuses me since it has been proven that it isn't the OS. I have never made changes to my BIOS. The only thing I could think of is that I'm not OCing. The odd thing to is Sandra says I'm running at 197F. I had a hard time believing this since my laptop did not feel nearly hot enough to be that high. I am really under the belief that there is a faulty temp sensor. I'd like to know more about this, and if anyone wants to know more about my system I will answer any questions.

UPDATE:
Ran my laptop outside since it was pretty dang humid, never shut off on me. I'll have to try running it in a really cool environment later this week.

This may be off topic, but I'm looking for anything that might solve this...

Looking through the bios options (0F08.P00) I notice under I believe the Power(?) tab something called "RF Power Control". The info screen on the right says the options for this are "Disable," "Enable," and "Auto." Yet my actual setting says "Restore."

Can someone tell me what the RF Power Control is? What is the default setting? Etc. I've tried Googling for answers but just haven't found anything relevant.

Thanks.