In past few weeks, my laptop just randomly got off, just like that... without any warning. I'm not talking about self-shut down. It just died. I had to wait for a few minutes, and then restart it and it would work fine.
Investigation concluded that it was happening because it was getting overheated. The CPU used to remain quite hot all the time, and then an extra bit of processing (McAfee scan etc.) would trigger the temperature to go beyond the critical limit, and that will take the laptop down.
I had no visibility of temperature. The IT guy helped me with that by installing a free utility called speedfan. It is a free tool, available to download at http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php
Not only can you monitor temperature, but you can schedule events such that it will throw popup or other forms of alert if temperature remains higher than a set limit for some time. Very handy.
Long term solution was obviously to get the laptop operated by our local IT support, to get fresh thermal paste applied to the CPU so that effective cooling can happen. All fixed today, let's see how it goes.
Investigation concluded that it was happening because it was getting overheated. The CPU used to remain quite hot all the time, and then an extra bit of processing (McAfee scan etc.) would trigger the temperature to go beyond the critical limit, and that will take the laptop down.
I had no visibility of temperature. The IT guy helped me with that by installing a free utility called speedfan. It is a free tool, available to download at http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php
Not only can you monitor temperature, but you can schedule events such that it will throw popup or other forms of alert if temperature remains higher than a set limit for some time. Very handy.
Long term solution was obviously to get the laptop operated by our local IT support, to get fresh thermal paste applied to the CPU so that effective cooling can happen. All fixed today, let's see how it goes.
