pc keeps turning on help please

stedeb

hi guys
have an e machine 610 about 5 year old
was working ok yesterday when kids on the net and went to lock up last night and noticed pc was still running
it was not on the monitor so held power button for 5 seconds and knocked it off after a few seconds it came back on itself and would not kick in tried again and came back on
i have it unpluged at the moment
anyone got any ideas what could be wrong or how to fix

this happened about a month ago so i did a full system restore and it sored it out but had to reoad everything which is a pain

thanks for any help
stedeb

Lpfsox

something similar happened my machine a while back - tried replacing the CMOS battery which appeared to fix the issue for a while but then it came back. It got to the point where the machine would boot spontaneously in the middle of the night and sometimes would not power off properly. Turned out the capacitors on the board were leaking; got someone to remove them and solder on new ones which fixed the problem but unless you're very attached to the machine it's an extreme method of fixing the problem.

stedeb

hi lpfsox
this was happening the last time i wold come down stairs and here it running and ended up putting it to factory settings

do you think its a harddrive or motherboard problem ?
thanks
stedeb

phil16phil

In my opinion..... 6/7 times out of ten this is a sticky on/off switch.

Lpfsox

well like I said Stedeb in my case it was leaky capacitors on the motherboard, though I did suspect it was a virus initially (after ruling out the battery and a faulty switch!) as if the settings are right then the machine can be booted via the ethernet card, but all my a/v and malware scans came back clean.

Before doing anything drastic make sure you've scanned for nasties, check out the on/off switch and replace the CMOS battery and see if that makes a difference.

stedeb

hi guys
phyl
dont thing its the button as it still clicks but will open up and check it properly

lpfsox
ill try an avg scan and see if it helps
other sites say in the bios it might be set to come on if phone rings or work on lan
any opinion
for your problem its well over my head but ill google it to see iwhere to check
thanks

Overheal

Theres a BIOS setting that controls Wake conditions for the motherboard/PC. One of these is a loss of power. If the setting is left on, and you had a blackout, the PC would wake as soon as power was restored.

Go into the BIOS and check out your power settings tab.

stedeb

hi oh
how do you check the bios

i have the machine running now and doing avg
no virus just tracking cookies at the moment

wolfric

press f12 at startup (when the black screen shows before windows starts)


Talk about ghost in the machine...

Overheal

actually on an Emachine its likely to be DEL, or F2, when you get the bootup screen,

you should see these options when you see the E-Machine logo when you first power up the machine.