Acer cutting out and dying

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Hi all,

Hope this is in the right palce, apologies if it's not.

I'm having a problem with an Acer 5520 travelmate suddenly dying for no reason. I thought it was overheating, but recently it's been doing it when it hasn't been all that hot so I'm beginning to doubt it's heat/fan related.

It only ever seems to happen when I'm on the net, and is a lot more liklely to happen if I'm streaming or playing a DVD. Tends to be very inconsistant, too: sometimes dies after 15 mins, sometimes runs for 3 - 4 hours without a problem.

Am running Vista if that helps, and strangely, when I reboot, it doesn't offer to reboot in safe mode - it just boots up normally.

Any help appreciated!

P.

polyfusion

Possibly malware or virus related? Make sure your virus definitions are up-to-date and run a scan. For the malware, install something like malwarebytes, make sure it is up-to-date, and run a scan, see if it finds and removes anything. After that, make sure your OS is up-to-date with security patches/updates/etc. If it's only happening when your playing DVDs or streaming (through a browser or media player?) make sure this software is up-to-date as well, and see if things improve.

Try to eliminate it as being a software issue before considering it could be a hardware issue.

bbtex

Update WIFI driver

smithcity

I've had similar trouble myself though with mine I was sure it was down to overheating.
If you want to rule this out, you can download a program called speedfan.exe which will monitor your core temperature. It's on download.com or you can just google it.
I've found the acer's to usually be pretty hardy and not suffer with overheating, so it may be a long shot

Overheal

speedfan is fine, but I use moo0 monitor for just about everything. It'll let you know your temps and you network traffic and even your Hard Disk activity - which is a really hard function to find, I've discovered as well as telling you which processes are causing chokepoints.