Spontaneous shutdown.
The *nice* shutdown, not a sudden power-off.
"Windows is shutting down"
Happens without warning, out of nowhere.
One moment you're doing stuff, the next moment you're looking at the windows goodbye screen.

Sager 5760
AC power (Batter is full)
Happens both under XP and XP64 (multiboot)

Happens when playing World of Warcraft (Not sure about any other games, since that's the only game I play on the laptop).


Does not happen when the laptop is doing 'nothing in particular', does not happen when using regular productivity applications, does not happen browsig the web.

No viruses
Barebones clean installation.
Most not-used services are off.
Process list is short and sweet.

The problem started happening recently.
Nothing was changed about the system from before the problem was happening.

I suspected that it might be temperature related, but a cpu temperature logger shows nothing strange (peak of 46c on the hotter core).
The computer fan kicks in periodically, but since it's not on all the time that would indicate that the temps are not too high.

After running some utilities I found that the GPU has no temperature sensor, so I don't know what is up with that. Maybe it's just not setting a standard/expected register address.

I am looking for a bios somewhere, but can't find any.

My next test will be to down-clock the GPU to see if it has any affect on the sudden shutdowns.

I would appreciate any suggestions/solutions/info/bios/etc.

-scheherazade

When was the last time you cleaned out your heatsink of the dust bunnies? Check out this guide (model is different in the pics, but you get the idea)

I opened up the chassis and blew out all the sinks with an air compressor.

Although, I did not try to remove the heat sinks themselves.

It is possible that the thermal paste has dried up/ developed a gap.

-scheherazade

Possible but it would normally only do a NICE shutdown if a temp threshold was reached or if you were running on battery and the battery ran low. Anything weird happen to the system lights before it starts shutting down? I believe there is a temp threshold for shutdown in the BIOS. Have you checked the setting.