Laptop shuts down after approx 20 secs

My first thought is a bad battery and/or power supply.

Take the battery out, and measure the voltage on the terminals.

Come back a day latter, and see if the voltage is the same.

A drop of more than .2 volts with no load says the battery iseither not getting charged, or is not holding a charge.

Chas

How old is the laptop? What OS are you using on the laptop? What changes have you made to the software or hardware recently?

The answers to the above would determine how to proceed.

If this is all rather sudden and no changes have been made, then your power supply may be a problem; your battery, or CMOS battery. See if you can start the computer without the battery but with the ac adapter. If that works, then the battery is the problem.

If the computer does the same thing while plugged in, you may have a blown ac/dc converter. Depending on your systemboard, this could be a separate card in your laptop or one built on the systemboard.

If you've recenly upgraded the OS... Win2000 or WinXP... and this is an older computer, then go to the manufacturer's website and make sure your BIOS on the systemboard will support those OSes.

Check and see if you can boot using a boot disk (if not NTFS). Check your CD-ROM drive.

Klevo and KApok are listed on the same website.

My first question to you, is the PC still under warranty if so take it back. Be careful not to do anything that will void the warranty. The manual will eplain. PLus if still under warranty they often replace bad laptops with a newer model. Also the hard drive may have it's own warranty which is often up to 3 years. The memory may be lifetime, etc. So check into these issues first.

Does anything at all appear on the screen before it fails.Have you tried to access the system BIOS. Without knowing a bit more about the situation it's hard to offer suggestions. Please porvide more details about the system, what model number, list the system configuration and what OS.

If there's no video then I don't think the system's getting far enough into the boot process for the drive to be initialized. Reseat the CDROM, Hard Drive and memmory. If you purchased additional ram take that out and see what happens.

It may be that the hard drive has been damaged. If you can (know how)take the CDROM and hard drive out and see if it boots further.

As mentioned there may be issues with the power supply either onboard or the AC\DC adapter. Check the conections to the power sources.

http://www.clevo.com