Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with shutdown

Computer shuts down when streaming video?

mediocre — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:12:08 -0800

Why is my laptop shutting down when streaming videos? Whenever I watch videos online, particularly from Megavideo but even from Youtube occasionally, the whole system will simply shut down. Can anyone offer any help, anyone ever experienced a similar issue? Would a clean system install help matters? Overheating?

It's an eMachines M5312 (yes yes, I know.. my first error was buying eMachines..)

What possible causes are there for an ACPI power button event?

drdevice — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:55:55 -0800

What reasons could there be for the ACPI power button event being triggered, other than someone pressing the power button on a server? I have a CentOS 4 server in a colocation facility, which recently shut down without an admin initiating the shutdown. After some investigation, I found the following in acpid's log:

acpid:[Sun Mar 1 05:06:48 2009] received event "button/power PWRF 00000080 00000001"
acpid:[Sun Mar 1 05:06:48 2009] executing action "/sbin/shutdown -h now"
acpid:[Sun Mar 1 05:06:48 2009] BEGIN HANDLER MESSAGES
acpid:[Sun Mar 1 05:06:48 2009] END HANDLER MESSAGES
acpid:[Sun Mar 1 05:06:48 2009] action exited with status 0
acpid:[Sun Mar 1 05:06:48 2009] completed event "button/power PWRF 00000080 00000001"
acpid:[Sun Mar 1 05:06:51 2009] exiting

This seems to indicate to me that someone in our colocation provider's datacenter accidentally shut down our server by pressing the power button. However, they say that none of their staff were in that part of their datacenter at the time the server was shut down. I've done some searching and I've been unable to find any other causes for this event, besides it showing up sometimes when restoring from suspend or hibernation (which this server was definitely not doing).

I'm a little dubious of their explanation, but I'd like to have some evidence to back me up before I talk to them again. So, my question is - is there anything besides someone pressing the power button on the server that will trigger the button/power ACPI event?

My Toshiba laptop is narcoleptic - help!

Salvor Hardin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:26:37 -0800

My computer abruptly shuts off during normal operation. Please help! The backstory:
I own a Toshiba Satellite A215 which runs Windows Vista. Ever since I bought it, it has exhibited a strange behavior. During normal operation, the screen abruptly goes black (with the backlight still on). The "on" indicator remains lit, but it is completely unresponsive to any input except holding down the power button (manual shut-down). I can then restart it normally. Out of a sample of several dozen incidents, this has only happened when the computer was not plugged in, and it happens fairly consistently when I leave it unplugged (within 20 minutes). Note that the battery does not read as empty - it often happens when it shows fully charged (before and after the incident).

The problem:
While annoying, that is avoidable, and it isn't the main problem (I don't even know if it's related to the main problem). Today, my computer started abruptly shutting off during normal operation, even when plugged in. This time it really shuts off (no screen backlight). Whenever it does this (within about 10 min of turning it on), the "on" and "CPU" and "battery" indicator lights flicker weakly for a few seconds, then go dark. After that it can be restarted. This seems like a really bad sign. Note that this behavior is also not at all correlated with an empty battery. It is under warranty at BestBuy, but (for only slightly irrational reasons), I strongly dislike dealing with BestBuy. Plus, it would be a real pain to go without a computer for a while.

The question:
What are the chances that this is an easy fix? Could getting a new battery possible fix this? Any ideas what's going on or how to make it right again? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated, and I'd be happy to provide more information if needed. Thank you!!

MacBook woes.

piratebowling — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:12:29 -0800

MacBook acting strange. Help! Let me start out by saying that I am planning on taking the computer to a genius bar to have it checked out. I just want to make sure there is not some obvious culprit I can try to tackle before going there.

I have a MacBook that was purchased in Mid to late 2007. When I first got it, it had a problem of shutting down randomly. At these times it would give me a message that it had to restart (in several languages) and it seemed to happen primarily (if not exclusively) when it was NOT plugged in. After a couple weeks, however, it stopped misbehaving and gave me no problems.

Fast forward to about 8 or 9 months later (March of this year). It starts shutting down on me with some regularity. It happens mostly when I am either online or using a java program a friend wrote for me. It shuts down without a message, and often simply falls asleep and refuses to wake back up. I take it to the Mac store, and they decide based ont he information I give them that the computer needs a new logicboard. That is replaced, and it seemed fine for about a month.

Now, it is shutting down every time I use this java program. Within minutes, if not seconds, the computer shuts down. I do NOT hear the fan running when this happens, although the computer gets very hot. This shut down happens both when the computer is plugged in and when it is running off a battery. I should also mention that the java program did not always cause the computer to shut down but now seems to be a trigger for it.

Also, possibly related, the charger will sometimes just turn itself off (meaning the light shuts off and it stops charging) until I unplug and replug the charger back into the computer. This charger problem had been happening before the logic board was replaced as well.

Thanks so much.

My XP takes too long to shut down & boot up. What could be causing it?

cheero — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:29:59 -0800

My XP takes too long to shut down & boot up. What could be causing it? In the past 2-3 months I've noticed that whenever I shutdown or reboot, the computer needs at least 5 minutes to do so. It keeps getting stuck on 'saving your settings' window for at least 5 minutes. This wasn't an issue before so I am wondering what I can do to fix it.

My Specs:

OS: WinXP Professional 5.1 SP2 (Build #2600)
CPU: Intel Pentium D , 2.99 GHz

Thanks!

Why is Firefox shutting down my PC?

jasonspaceman — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:29:06 -0800

Firefox is shutting down and restarting my PC, what gives? Suddenly, Firefox randomly shuts down my PC and I am baffled as to why it is doing this. I've tried reinstalling it, even deleting old profiles. I run adware, errorkiller, and hitman pro every few days.

My Flock browser has even started doing the same shutdown and restart while IE and Opera run without shutting down and restarting my PC. All other programs run fine.

I have 1.0 gig of RAM on an XP run PC. Could this be a memory issue? Virus or worm?

One touch shutdown

waterlily — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:22:51 -0800

Asking for Mr Waterlily: "I would like write a script that starts when the computer starts, goes into a permanent loop, looks to see if a key is pressed, if the key is pressed it would do something, if not it would pause n seconds then loop again. How does one detect key events in applescript?" "I am running system 9.1. "

This is for a digital photo frame project made from an old powerbook 1400 we had lying around, if that's at all relevant. He wants it to automatically turn off the machine when a key is pressed (just shutting down instantly without bringing up any menus or options as the power button would). We are not mac people so if there's something easier he's missing, please advise.

Why does Bioshock make my WinXP computer completely shut off?

bradn — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 07:08:14 -0800

Why does Bioshock make my WinXP computer completely shut off? Recently installed Windows XP Pro, XFX Nvidia 7600GT, Athlon 64 X2 3800, 2GB RAM. All drivers up to date, new Nvidia Bioshock patch installed. All overheating-shutoff settings disabled in BIOS.

When I launch the Bioshock demo, I can't make it past the loading screen. Sometimes it happens at the credits, sometimes during loading, but it never makes it to the game engine. It's a complete shutdown - power off - no warning, no blue screen, no "last best settings" during boot, and no "system has recovered from a serious error" when it starts back up.
It doesn't happen during any other games, including HL2 and BF2. Since the reinstall, it does occasionally do this when booting Windows, after the WinXP logo, it just shuts off. Occasionally.
Twice now, instead of this complete shut down, when launching Bioshock, the video card has seemingly just shut down. The fan is still running, the computer is still running, but the monitor goes into sleep mode. Also, no sound is playing. This is leading me to believe it may be a video card issue.
Bioshock demo works great on the same system in Vista (dual-boot). But since XP is still my primary OS, I would like it to work there.

Any ideas?
Great game (so far), by the way.

What happened to my laptop, and did I fix it?

sleeplessunderwater — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:57:10 -0800

Laptopfilter: I'm curious about how CPU usage, noise level, and being able to go to standby/hibernation and shut down properly are related. For a long time (over a year, I think) my HP laptop(running Windows XP) was at 100% CPU usage all the time, ran loudly, and wouldn't go to standby or hibernation or shut down all the way. There's a lot When this started: I packed it up one day, closing the cover and putting it in the case as I usually did (I had it set to either hibernate or go to standby when I closed the cover) except in a bit more of a hurry than usual. When I opened it back up, it wasn't on standby--the lights in front weren't doing the "in standby" thing where one of them slowly blinks, and nothing I did would bring it out. I had to turn it off by holding the power button in, and restarted it. I soon noticed that several things had changed:

CPU usage was always at 100%, whereas normally it would stay between 1% and 10% and only spike occasionally when I started an application or something. It would also be quite loud.

When I tried to put it into standby or hibernation, the screen would go blank--not as if it were turned off, but more screensaver-black. It would not come out of this and would need to be turned off and restarted.

It also wouldn't shut down properly, and would get stuck at the "Windows is shutting down" screen. I could turn it off at this point, and it seemed to treat this as a proper shutdown--it didn't do that "Windows was shut down improperly" thing when I restarted.

Lastly, the screen would occasionally go dark for a few seconds and then come back. Again, this was screensaver-black, not turned-off-black. It seemed to stop doing this for a while (months at a time) but would still occasionally do it.

It didn't seem to be overheating (I could touch it, even use it on my lap, without being burned. Although for a while I absolutely refused to leave it on when I wasn't there, I started using it for longer and longer periods of time and it never seemed to get too hot). It also didn't seem to be running any slower than normal, and aside from the things I mentioned seemed to be working completely normally. I could even log out and log back in; it was only standby, hibernation, and shutdown that wouldn't work.

(I did mean to get it checked out, believe me, and I backed up all my data when it started, but it would have meant ~~clearing off my porn~~ cleaning up my hard drive and paying someone and since I 1)was lazy and 2)didn't really have the spare cash, I just watched it carefully and fretted. As time went on and nothing else happened, it seemed considerably less urgent.)

I ran virus scans, of course, but really I thought it was probably some kind of hardware issue (because of the noise and because it didn't seem to be affecting most functioning) and that I'd somehow jostled something out of place. This theory seemed to be reinforced when I was testing out some Linux live cds and it still did the CPU thing and the noise thing (although it would let me shut down) and for some of them wouldn't boot from the cd unless I turned it off and let it cool down first.

Fast-forward to the present. I recently switched to Opera out of frustration with Firefox's increasing slowness and need for me to restart it every few hours and reboot every couple days or so. Opera was much better about this and I could leave it up all the time. So, for the first time in a while I'd left my computer on for more than a couple days at a time and it, I believe, overheated and shut itself down. (I wasn't using it at the time, but the sudden lack of noise made me go over and check, and it did seem hotter than normal. I propped it up to let the air circulate more, and turned it on when it seemed cool to make sure it would start.) It had never done this before.

I did a quick search and from what I found, I thought it seemed likely that the fan was clogged, so I took out the battery and partially opened up the case. (Only partially, because even after I unscrewed all the screws I could find, it was still attached somehow at the front.) I carefully poked a q-tip around in the fan area and it came out slightly dusty but not with an amount of dust that seemed like it would actually clog the fan. I closed it back up and blew hard a couple times into the air intake. Nothin'.

When I started it back up, it was running like it had been before all this started. CPU usage was normal; it could hibernate and go into standby normally. It was also much quieter--a normal level of noise. "Fixed!" I thought, and also, more quietly, "WTF?".

Then, a few days later, it turned itself off again, this time while I was using it. (When I started it up, it didn't do the "Windows was shut down improperly" thing, either.)

Before that, I had it on a table with a few sheets of newspaper on it--a reasonably hard surface, I thought. Now, it's on four carefully placed decks of cards (it's stable, and the left-back one isn't covering the air intake) to give it more circulation around it. I'm also keeping an eye on the temperature and noise level now--I've noticed that a sudden increase in noise often coincides with a spike in CPU usage, but it doesn't go down as soon as CPU usage goes down. What's up with that? (Is the lag just because it takes the fan a little while to dissipate enough of the heat?)

So--what was going on? Did my poking around fix things, somehow jostle something back into place? What's going on now? Is the fan just starting to fail now? Does this, as I assume it does, mean I shouldn't leave it on and not on standby overnight (the noise helped me sleep. I should probably just look into a white noise machine)?

Help me identify a hardware problem with my laptop.

Pontius Pilate — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:40:32 -0800

Help me identify a hardware problem with my laptop. I've been having more and more problems with my HP dv4000 laptop lately. Here is a brief background. Some weeks back, my laptop stopped charging when plugged in. It is still under warranty, and so the tech support sent me a new AC adapter. That didn't do anything. I then shipped the laptop to them, and got it back a week later with a note saying something to the effect that they've replaced the "reasoning board" or something similar (presumably, they meant the motherboard). The laptop was charging fine again, and everything seemed okay.

I was able to play DVDs, use the Internet, MSOffice, etc. with no problems whatsoever. However, I ran into problems when I tried to start up games. (My laptop has a 128mb ATI Radeon x700 card.) About two minutes into the game - any 3D, computer resource-intensive game - the computer shuts down by itself in the following sequence. First, all animation etc. on the screen freezes, but I can still move the mouse. The mouse also stops responding about 15 seconds later, and another 10 seconds after that, the laptop shuts down. When I press the power button immediately afterwards, the hard drive spins up and the screen comes on, but it shuts down again a second later. (This happens either once or twice.) However, when I press the power button again right after, the boot-up sequence proceeds fine.

The last weird component to this is that all this happens only when the computer is plugged into the AC adapter. When it's running on battery power, I can play games until the battery drains with no shutdowns or other weird glitches. I do seem to recall hearing some months ago that HP laptops have some power jack problems, but I can't seem to find anything confirming this.

So - what could this be? I realize I can take this to HP tech support again, since the laptop is still under warranty. However, when I called them to address this, their first solution was for me to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. I have good reason to believe that this is a hardware and not a software problem, inasmuch as it never occurs while the laptop is on battery power, but I don't know exactly where the issue lies. If someone were able to identify the hardware problem, I could simply direct the tech support to fix that particular part, and not have to go through the pain of backing up about 60 gigs of data, reformatting the hard drive, and reinstalling Windows only to discover the issue still there.

As always, any help is greatly appreciated.

Windows XP Home: Turn Off hangs.

prodevel — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 02:24:15 -0800

How do I get Windows XP Home to shut down properly? I'ts hanging and I have to power cycle. I'm a fairly computer literate person (Unix admin/proggie.) I hate windows of course. I'm not sure of where to find what's hanging my system during shutdown/"turn off" (XP Home.) I have to push the power button to kill it.

Nothing stands out in eventvwr; I power it off manually so it doesn't have a chance to report problems w/apps hanging I guess... Somehow I suspect MS's recent IE 'fix' is farking it up although I've been using FireFox for a while now.

Please let me know steps you'd take to try to discern what could hang shut down and how to fix it, please.

Thanks muchly :)

VAIO shutdown - startup issues

trinarian — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 01:47:51 -0800

Sony VAIO SZ shutdown - startup issues. My friend has a nearly new Sony VAIO SZ13C bought in Shenzhen, China. He recently aquired a portable hard drive for it. Since then his computer locks up on shutdown unless the portable USB HDD is plugged in. There is also a start-up issue where every few boots the internal HDD light doesn't flicker on bootup and the scrolling blue pegs move very slowly on the startup screen.

It will shutdown correctly in safemode.

The only hardware issue we can see in device manager is an IEEE 1394 controller is disabled on startup.

It also restarts OK with that controller turned back on, Rising Anti-Virus auto-protect turned off.

Mandatory: HELP! line.

Why must you shutdown, XP?

grabbingsand — Sun, 21 May 2006 18:34:42 -0800

Why must XP insist so infernally on rebooting? My wife has an IBM NetVista (2292 CBU). It's about four years old. It is running Windows XP Pro, SP 2. Lately, it has decided to reboot with little reason or warning. At its worst moments, it will go into a rebooting cycle where the power supply will whirr to life, the IBM splash will come up, then it will power down. This repeats. Other times, when powered up from the button, it will show the IBM splash, the WinXP splash, then power down. Most of the time, it will simply reboot, usually after popping up the WinXP shutdown dialogue box. She can hit cancel, only to have it return soon after. And that second time, hitting cancel only gets rid of the dialogue, but not the eventual reboot.

So far, this is what I've been able to discover and/or investigate:

- Certain models in this IBM NetVista line were notorious for having/developing . The symptoms for that problem align, but an examination of the board reveals none of the tell-tale signs of capacitor leakage.
- In the XP system events log, there was a regular error upon bootup (confirmed by looking at the boot log) involving a missing ASPI driver. While rare, it appears that a malfunctioning ASPI32.sys can cause hangups. This driver has been reinstalled, the error no longer appears.
- When it would reboot, the fan on the power supply would audibly increase in speed. The stock power supply on an IBM NetVista is 185w. Since we've installed a better video card and a second harddrive, I thought that the power supply might be over-taxed, so the stock has been replaced with a new 300w. This seemed to stop the reboots, but only for a week.
- The IBM NetVista has a multi-function keyboard with a "standby key." Just to make sure, I've gone into msconfig and removed that app from the startup. This seems to have had little to no effect.
- Techie friends have been asking me to supply them with the minidump file, but since this appears to be a system-spawned reboot, there is no real crash to record and then decode.

So ... I'm reaching the ends of several ropes. Sometimes, the machine will run for six or seven hours. Other times, it throws the shutdown dialogue in under ten minutes. I'm looking for any possible ideas or avenues that I've not considered, or any similar experiences. Fire at will.

Tool?

madmath — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:07:14 -0800

I'm looking for a tool I can use to prevent users from shutting off the computers in the public library. We just added a new timeout software, and it messes up the program when computers are restarted. Is there anything like a waterbottle cap and duct tape that would look more professional?

Sleep or Shut Off my iBook?

WCityMike — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 11:20:45 -0800

Shoud I put my iBook to sleep, or shut it down, when I'm done with it? I've heard varying accounts, as well as differing personal experiences.

Basically, I'd appreciate both anecdotal and hard data, if either exists.

Security is not a concern -- the laptop's battery lock had the surrounding circle snap off, meaning the battery is more prone to falling out. Thus, the laptop usually doesn't leave my apartment. (And, besides, there's a password-protection feature in the OS somewhere, right? Password on waking from sleep? I've got Mac OS 10.3.9.)

I get the sense, when I put it to sleep, that it will still generate heat, whereas shutting it off would not. I don't know if this is utter B.S. or not.

Also, I also don't know if some process will decide to make it wake up or not, which could be a slight annoyance if the light from the LCD screen decides to broadcast itself across the apartment at 3:00 pm.

On the other hand, I imagine shutting it off and then turning it back on is probably a strain on various components. And I keep hearing about Mac owners and Linux users who are so proud of their "uptime," so keeping it on can't be all that bad.

My Google-fu on this particular problem is a bit weak, so any links to other people's examinations of the problem would be appreciated, as well as any thoughtful analyses.

(I do have a cat, but he has been pretty good about staying away from the computer, so I don't think that would factor into the problem.)

Shutting Down...

terrier319 — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 08:40:58 -0800

Since installing XP professional in November, I have experienced a spontaneous shutdown and restart of my desktop. When it returns, it tells me the system has recovered from a fatal error that is caused by an unspecified device driver. I have uninstalled both software and hardware one by one over the last several weeks in hopes of identifying the problem. Nothing. Even system restore does not solve it. Is is time to reinstall XP, even with the risk that it will likely happen again?

Is there a way to get XP to shut itself down after a specified interval of time?

kaibutsu — Sat, 22 May 2004 17:26:45 -0800

Is there a way to get XP to shut itself down after a specified interval of time? (So I can run a task on autopilot that will take a couple of hours after I want to go to sleep, without the annoyance of waking up to the whine of the computer...)

Mac G4 restarts on its own

mdn — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 08:17:53 -0800

I have a Mac G4 with a similar problem to some recent questions - it restarts when I try to shut it down. (more inside) Even when I set it to shut down at a certain time, instead of shutting down it will restart... this problem is difficult to fix by cleaning it because I can't turn it off... I've just been leaving it on the last week or so. Any ideas?

Shut Down!

NekulturnY — Sun, 18 Jan 2004 09:08:52 -0800

I installed a new OS (mmyes, it was M$ W2k) on my computer on a new hard drive. The old system and the new OS now work next to each other, but I have a technical matter that I can't solve. On the old OS (W98), if I say "Shut down", it will also automatically shut down the power of the computer after it shuts down Windows.

The W2k OS doesn't do that, and while it's not a big issue, I have enough of the neurotic in me to want it to work on the W2k as well. Where and how do I make it do that?