Laptop Shuts Off - No Error Msg, No BSOD

[boweasel]

My wife purchased a refurbished W7 Home Premium laptop about 3 months ago. It's an HP Pavilion-g7 Notebook, and it's been working flawlessly until yesterday, when it just suddenly shut off. When I turned the quite warm laptop back on I got a message about it shutting down to prevent damage from overheating. I then shut it down with the power button and sprayed some compressed air into the fan and vent areas.

An hour later I turned it back on, and it seemed to boot okay. I ran an elevated sfc /scannow which found no integrity violations, set a restore point and let the battery charge until it was at 100%. The whole process probably took about 45 minutes and I detected absolutely no sign of the previous overheating. I assumed it was okay so I gave it back to my wife who used it for another 45 minutes before it shut off again, once again with no physical evidence of a heat problem.

Although I've been able to get it started since then, it fails to stay on long enough to even let me open Event Viewer.

 

[rvcjew]

I had this same laptop and started having the same issues, I opened the laptop and found a second CMOS battery (from the factory I guess) that had been logged somewhere and eventually had come loose causing shorts. Removing the battery solved the problem, if you shake it do you hear anything loose inside?

 

[boweasel]

Okay, I managed to get this to stay on for long enough to make the following changes:

• I thought it might still be an overheating issue, and knowing that the constant charging of the battery generates heat, I removed the battery and started running it using the power cord
• I went into Power Options and changed the Maximum Processor Rate from 100% to 99% when the unit was plugged in

Afterwards the laptop booted just fine. We left it on overnight, saw that it had not shut down the next day, and she used it for the next 2 days without incident.

Last night it shut off again without warning. The AC adapter was still solidly connected. The laptop did not seem to be particularly warm - nowhere near as warm as it was when it first shut off, before I blasted it with the compressed air. Restarting brings up the 2 choices - Repair your computer or Start Windows normally. Starting normally causes a shutdown during the splash screen. Repair your computer brings up the repair screen with the message 'your computer was unable to start', we get a quick flash of a DOS screen which contains some information that I cannot read, the DOS screen gets smaller as if the resolution had suddenly got higher, and it goes into the (also smaller) startup repair, which runs for 15-20 seconds before shutting off again.

This morning I unplugged the unit, removed the battery, held in the power button for 45 seconds, put the battery back in and tried to boot it off the fully charged battery. When I got the same 2 startup options, I selected the repair . This time it went through the same process as before with the DOS screen and the resolution change. But this time it did not shut off. The startup repair continued to run. After 10-15 minutes I reattached the power cord and it continued with the same startup repair with the blue bar going from left to right. Then it asked me if I wanted to do a system restore. I selected yes, since I had created a restore point when it seemed to be functional a couple of days ago. Of course it didn't start the restore - the repair bar continued to display for at least a half hour before finally taking me to an HP diagnostic screen.

Here I could select system restore, complete factory restore or diagnostics. Diagnostics gave me the option of performing a check disk on the C: drive, the recovery partition, or going to a command prompt. Since none of those options seemed useful (I had already removed the hard drive and done a chkdsk /r while it was slaved to another PC), I went back and selected restore to a previous day. Amazingly, there were 2 new restore points that Windows had set - both labeled Critical updates - after my manual RP. I ignored the 2 Windows RPs and selected the one I had manually set.

After about 20 minutes I got the msg that restore had not completed successfully, that an unspecified error had occurred during the System Restore - 0x8000ffff.

It has now been sitting on that screen for at least an hour without shutting off. I could click on the Details option if anyone thinks it will help.

EDIT - Sorry. There was no option for Details on the Restore error. However when I hit the Cancel button (the only other option was to select a different restore point), the PC started to reboot and I was again presented with the Repair or Normal options. This time I selected Normal. The computer booted normally, telling me that it HAD been restored successfully to my manually set point. Everything seems to be working correctly now, but I am totally confused about so much of this. I want into Event Viewer and could find nothing at all to indicate any problems.

 

[rvcjew]

Glad you got it back up after all that. Did you ever try to shake it like I asked, you would have probably noticed something loose when extracting the HDD though. The event viewer does not have anything about restoring successfully?

 

[boweasel]

Glad you got it back up after all that. Did you ever try to shake it like I asked, you would have probably noticed something loose when extracting the HDD though. The event viewer does not have anything about restoring successfully?

No the event viewer has nothing about the restore because the restore didn't work.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2695585

And it is not back up - it shutdown yet again on my wife.
And I did shake it and did a visual inspect when I removed the HDD, but saw and heard nothing to indicate a loose extra CMOS battery.

 

[rvcjew]

OK that sucks yeah we did not see the battery until we opened the whole unit apart, which is not as easy as you would think. They have a lot of plastic tabs holding that thing together. That is probably not your issue though if you do not hear anything. Have you tired to live boot like say ubuntu and just let it run and see if it just shuts off?

 

[Mellon Head]

My father in law has an HP notebook that does this. The fan bearings are shot (prematurely), and the fan slows to a stop after a while, and the laptop shuts down. It can also do it on power up.

I tested it by putting a small piece of Kleenex and a little bit of tape on the exhaust port. It doesn't block the port, but it flutters when the fan is working. I can see when the fan stops just before it shuts down. Maybe you could try that? It would give you something to rule out at least if your fan doesn't stop. Then we can look at some other causes.

 

[boweasel]

My father in law has an HP notebook that does this. The fan bearings are shot (prematurely), and the fan slows to a stop after a while, and the laptop shuts down. It can also do it on power up.

I tested it by putting a small piece of Kleenex and a little bit of tape on the exhaust port. It doesn't block the port, but it flutters when the fan is working. I can see when the fan stops just before it shuts down. Maybe you could try that? It would give you something to rule out at least if your fan doesn't stop. Then we can look at some other causes.

I can feel the air coming out of the exhaust vent - it's warm, but not excessively so. And I can hear the fan blowing as well - our house is very quiet, and in that quiet, the spinning of that fan is faintly audible. The fan only shuts down when the laptop shuts off.

I started it up and invoked the HP Diagnostics - it ran for hours and hours without a single shutdown. But I did learn something - this Pavilion has 2 memory slots, each one holding 2 GBs of RAM. According to the HP diagnostics only the upper stick is functional. I get the same results from running crucial.com's scan tool. So I've only got half the memory I thought I did.

If the bottom stick went bad, could that be a cause of these shutdowns?

 

[rvcjew]

Yes that will cause system halts all day open the cover and remove the one stick and see what happens if you use the pc.

 

[boweasel]

Yes that will cause system halts all day open the cover and remove the one stick and see what happens if you use the pc.

Frustration is what happened....
I removed the bad stick - at least I 'think' I did - HP Diagnostics pegged it as the 'under' stick. Then I moved the good stick to the under and tried to boot. It hit the Welcome screen and shut off. Then I put the bad stick in the top slot and it booted to the desktop. And now she has 4GB of memory back.

I dunno.... I gave it back to her and she's busy with Facebook. If it shuts down again I'm gonna take it to a computer shop.

 

[rvcjew]

wait so it is working again after you swapped the two sticks around? The two slots should be both accessible at once and are on top of each other correct? It sounds like your bottom slot may have gone bad. If you can you should get a usb drive or cd and run memtest86+ from the UBCD in linked in my signature. You should run it with each chip at a time then altogether. Ultimate Boot CD - Download the UBCD