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automatic shutdown?

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14 replies

by seadogs

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I have a win95 machine that appears to be randomly shutting down. This behavior started about a week ago. In various different applications, some Office 2000, and some not, it suddenly flicks to a black screen. Shortly it comes up with the "It isnow safe to shut your computer off" message. If you do restart however, it goes through a message that the system wasn't shut down and goes through scan disk. The other thing that has happened is that when working in word documents, it will freezeup and garble the text. We have run the latest virus scan from symantec. Any suggestions as to what may be causing this would be greatly appreciated. The system is a P-166 with 64 MB RAM.

14 replies

by tora

It looks as though you may have a hardware problem. If you have another PC, swap hard disks to isolate the software problem. If everything goes ok on the swapped PC then the fault may lie witht the BIOS of the original PC. Is it a cloned PC?
Good Luck

by shmaltz

I have seen this problem a lot of times most of the times it is the CPU FAN that stoped working.
Just open up the box and when the cover is not on the box turn on the power (make sure not to put ANYTHING inside the box while the power is on) now watch for the CPU FAN if it dosnt work then this is the problem, however if it does run make sure that when you put the cover back on the box that there is no cables that block the CPU FAN.

by leo.valmores

If after checking Answer2's suggestion, the fan is OK and yet the problem persists, then I suggest to reset the memory modules or better still, try to replace them temporarily with other memory modules to assess if the problem disappears.

by seadogs

This is a cloned PC. If none of these 3 suggestions work by the end of the week I'll post another comment. Thanks so far for the suggestions!

by justmeangie

I have had a few at my job do this was a simple fix, if your problem was the same as mine, I went in to display properties where screen saver is and there is the energy star area, go into the settings and set it for never never that solved my problem hope this isnt a dumb suggestion also have you defragged lately? run speed disk may help

by o_tudor

I just recently went through a problem similiar. The difference was that the computer completely shut down. It was using a ATX power supply. I am guessing that the problem was in the motherboard (the component that controls the power). I changedpower supplies to an AT type and so far (its been two days) it have not shut down yet.

by mickietee

An additional possibility to the power supply (I had that problem on a machine recently, too) is a worm virus in the system, that is causing the shut-down. Two that I have dealt with this month that got by McAfee VirusScan for some reason are:
?KAK(SEARCH: "kak," in root directory and windows) find virus killers at McAfee or Norton
?qaz worm: (SEARCH: "note.com" in windows folder.) Likewise, search McAfee and Symantec sites for its virus killer for this worm. This worm was responsible for regular shut-downs on our artist's PC, but also infected the rest of computers on our main network.

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