Hardware Laptop shutting down automatically

[naved.islam14]

For the last several months, my laptop has been shutting down automatically when I played games (Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars, Star Craft 2, Spider-man 3 etc.). I think this is due to overheating because whenever it turn off the laptop is really hot. I would like to know what is exactly causing this problem and how to solve it.


(Sorry for a very long post

)

 

[Sausage Head]

Check your battery/charge it/replace it/play with the charging thing plugged-in.
And no, that was not a long post.

 

[Strider]

Model and details please

 

[naved.islam14]

Check your battery/charge it/replace it/play with the charging thing plugged-in.
And no, that was not a long post.

How do I check my battery? I already charged it to 100% (will try again the next day), Only when I learn how to check my battery and I find its faulty, when I play with the charging thing plugged in it shut downs even more and sorry when I was posting it, it looked big but after posting it it looked smaller.

 

[Strider]

Try playing with AC plugged in but without battery.

 

[gumphfy]

Yup, it's overheating. I'ts done to prevent any serious damage to your CPU.
I have had the same problem with my laptop. But a thorough cleaning of the vents and the fan helped a lot. But if you wanna go all the way. Replace the heat zink on the CPU.

A "quick fix" is to take you vacuum cleaner and hold it up to the fan. It'll suck out some dust and what-not.

 

[Sausage Head]

How to check a laptop's battery life
I didn't know you had charged it. You probably don't need to charge it again.
You can check your laptop's temperature with Speccy.

 

[Strider]

Yup, it's overheating.

It looks like it, yes. But there are models/components without automatic shutdown, so we need details. There are other possibilities, too, e.g. battery related. Good notebooks do not overheat, they just get hot (if taken care of).

 

[naved.islam14]

Model and details please

Laptop:

Acer ASPIRE 4740G
Intel Core i3 processor 330M (2.13GHZ, 3MB L3 cache)
NVIDIA GeForce 310M Up to 1279MB TurboCache
14.0" HD LED LCD
2 GB Memory
320 GB HDD
DVD-Super Multi DL drive
Acer Nplify 802.11b/g/n
6-cell Li-ion battery

 

[Strider]

Have you had a look at your windows logs? Press the windows button, right click my computer -> manage, and there are all the logs. Look around the time it shut down. There might be a clear text hint as to why it shut down.

The Nvidia driver can also log GPU temperature as I recall, you might try that too.

 

[doyama]

You can try doing some simple things

1) Check that the fans are running. A laptop like that can't be running on passive heatsinks. There must be a few fans trying to blow heat out. See where those vents are and ensure the fans are working.

2) You can try a few cheap ways to aleviate heat issues. I've got some postit notes holding up the 4 corners of my netbook to give it some heat dissipation. You might try that first. You can also get a laptop cooling station that will cool the laptop as well.

3) Monitor your CPU temp

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Should give you an idea if your CPU or GPU is melting into oblivion

 

[Stewy12]

What do you have your laptop sat on? Even on a flat hard surface mine overheats so I got a Cooling Mat for it, I don't even plug it in but having it raised off the surface helps with the airflow and keeps it cool (ish).....

 

[mysticwaterfall]

You can download Speedfan and monitor the temps on your laptop that way. Also good to take a can of compressed air to your vents every so often.

 

[Coto]

Remove any dust / leftover which may block vents. The design of some notebooks allow to collect more shit/dust on heatsink/cpu fans, so that´s why you should at least clean them every 6 months.

Netbooks have all the parts soldered to motherboard, so most likely you´d have to take apart the lower protective case to do this. Notebooks have (most of them) a dedicated airflow vent, so removing some screws , then doing some cleaning to gpu/cpu heatsinks using a toothbrush will do

 

[naved.islam14]

Thanks for all the help guys!

 

[giantpune]

if youre not scared, you can open the thing up and clean the heatsink. or take it to a professional. you would be surprised how much shit collects on there. ive seen it look like a hairball coughed up by a lion.

that junk blocks the airflow around the hot metal. its the same effect you get if you had a broken fan. no airflow = hotter components = computer turns itself off to avoid damage.