System shutting down by itself

[Amused]

I have a box running an Asus P4T-E with a P4 2.0 and 1 gig of RDRAM.

The system is shutting down on it's own when idle. When the GF uses it, it runs just fine. But when she leaves it idle, it shuts itself down after an undetermined amount of time (an hour or two).

All the fans are working and there is no dust in the box. All virus and spyware scans come up clean. There are no other symptoms. I've seen no evidence or signs of overheating.

Anyone have any clues?

[edit]

I have swapped the power supply and it is still doing it. It has the latest BIOS, too.

I turned off Turbo mode in the BIOS and no change.

WTF could it be???

[edit #2]

Well, I have narrowed it down to one of the sensors on the mobo. Turning off the fan, temp and volt sensors resulted in no more shut downs.

I turned on all the volt sensors and it ran all day. So they were not the problem. I am now testing all the fan sensors. If it stays on all night, I'll test the two temp sensors one by one.

At least I now know what caused it. The only question left is why?

[edit#3]

Well, all sensors are on except temp and it ran overnight. Today I'll turn on one of the temp sensors and see what happens.

edit #4

Well, the problems are back, and all the sensors are turned off. So it wasn't them after all.

I have reseated everything to no avail.

WTF could it be???

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Start>Control Panel>Power Options
try starting there..

When the GF uses it, it runs just fine. But when she leaves it idle, it shuts itself down after an undetermined amount of time (an hour or two).

All the fans are working and there is no dust in the box. All virus and spyware scans come up clean. There are no other symptoms. I've seen no evidence or signs of overheating.

Anyone have any clues?

everytime I reread that I chuckle..comp or something a lil more personal ..

 

[jswjimmy]

try new bios to, my old se440bx2 used to do that and new bios fix it.
oh and try the bios settings too.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: ScrapSilicon
Start>Control Panel>Power Options
try starting there..

LOL, yeah, that was the first, most obvious thing I did. It's set to turn the monitor off at 10 minutes. Nothing was changed there.

Also, the system is not shutting itself down through windows. It is simply shutting itself off through the hardware. I checked the activity logs in Event viewer and they have no entries about a shutdown.

 

[3chordcharlie]

try swapping the PSU.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
try swapping the PSU.

It's a 300w Sparkle. But yeah, I guess I can try that if no one else has any other ideas. (I'm lazy, I know)

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
try swapping the PSU.

It's a 300w Sparkle. But yeah, I guess I can try that if no one else has any other ideas. (I'm lazy, I know)

It's probably fine - it's just the easiest thing to try, and I'm assuming you have more than one computer, so it should be easy (bad techie assumption I know... I can't actually remember the last time I didn't have at least one spare PSU kicking around...).

Updating the bios isn't a bad idea if there's a new one. Disable any and all temperatue protect shutoffs (bad sensor could cause it to think it overheated). And find the option to give a BSOD on errors instead of shutdown (in control panel, system performance *maybe* it's somewhere around there!) My brother had a computer that rebooted randomly after he bought XP (but had been fine in 98se). Changing that setting fixed the problem, and he never even got a BSOD, it just stopped rebooting

I think that was a KT266A chipset problem, but maybe you have something similar.

 

[RussianSensation]

Do you have an ATI videocard? Because if you do, it could be a driver issue. I had that for about 1 month swapping power supplies, changing motherboard bioses, reinstalling the cpu fan, trying everything I could.

In the end, all it took was a clean uninstall of the ATI Driver (dont remember which version), and all my random shutdowns/reboots disappeared. I was furious to realize that an ATI driver was resulting in my computer turning off randomly, and certainly havent heard of such an occurance. But it happened...Hopefully I dont experience anything like that again with any future versions. I can say that starting with 4.5 and up I haven't had this problem.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
try swapping the PSU.

It's a 300w Sparkle. But yeah, I guess I can try that if no one else has any other ideas. (I'm lazy, I know)

It's probably fine - it's just the easiest thing to try, and I'm assuming you have more than one computer, so it should be easy (bad techie assumption I know... I can't actually remember the last time I didn't have at least one spare PSU kicking around...).

Updating the bios isn't a bad idea if there's a new one. Disable any and all temperatue protect shutoffs (bad sensor could cause it to think it overheated). And find the option to give a BSOD on errors instead of shutdown (in control panel, system performance *maybe* it's somewhere around there!) My brother had a computer that rebooted randomly after he bought XP (but had been fine in 98se). Changing that setting fixed the problem, and he never even got a BSOD, it just stopped rebooting

I think that was a KT266A chipset problem, but maybe you have something similar.

I have a brand new Antec 350w here that came in a case, but I replaced it with a 430w true power. So yeah, I gotta spare.

I'll try some BIOS stuff later today.

The funny thing is, this exact hardware setup has been running in that box for a year now with no problems, and in another box for two years before that. It's never done anything like this.

But recently, the GF has been going out of town to take care of stores we have in MO. So I've been turning it off while she's gone. It never used to be turned off before that.

One of the first things I do after loading XP is turn off the reboot on BSOD. So I'm sure it's off.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: RussianSensation
Do you have an ATI videocard? Because if you do, it could be a driver issue. I had that for about 1 month swapping power supplies, changing motherboard bioses, reinstalling the cpu fan, trying everything I could.

In the end, all it took was a clean uninstall of the ATI Driver (dont remember which version), and all my random shutdowns/reboots disappeared. I was furious to realize that an ATI driver was resulting in my computer turning off randomly, and certainly havent heard of such an occurance. But it happened...Hopefully I dont experience anything like that again with any future versions. I can say that starting with 4.5 and up I haven't had this problem.

Nope. It's a Gainward Ti500 with a clean install of drivers.

 

[3chordcharlie]

If it used to be on 24/7 maybe a windows or driver update that was done a long time ago is the source of the problem

That could get hard to track down.

 

[Amused]

Well, I checked and it has the latest BIOS (1007). I disabled "turbo" mode for the RAM in the BIOS and we'll see what happens.

 

[Amused]

I think I may have fixed it.

I changed out the Sparkle PS for the Antec PS and it appears to be working fine. It's stayed on longer than it was before without shutting down. I'll leave it on overnight to see.

I'm amazed that a Sparkle PS that has been working flawlessly for 3-4 years in this exact same config suddenly became flaky.

 

[Amused]

Well, I spoke too soon. It just shut down.

WTF could it be?

HELP!!

 

[Amused]

Bump for help

 

[VirtualLarry]

Besides the power-management options in Windows, have you also checked the BIOS/CMOS settings? Sometimes those can actually override the ones in Windows, make sure that either power-management, APM, and ACPI are all disabled, or that power-management or APM is set to "user-defined", and the individual device time-out settings (disk, video, etc) are each "disabled".

You don't happen to have anything listed in the "Scheduled Tasks" folder, do you? Possibly a program that is configured to "Shutdown when done"? It's a remote possibility, I admit, but worth checking.

 

[3chordcharlie]

Can you disable all temp sensors and such?

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Besides the power-management options in Windows, have you also checked the BIOS/CMOS settings? Sometimes those can actually override the ones in Windows, make sure that either power-management, APM, and ACPI are all disabled, or that power-management or APM is set to "user-defined", and the individual device time-out settings (disk, video, etc) are each "disabled".

You don't happen to have anything listed in the "Scheduled Tasks" folder, do you? Possibly a program that is configured to "Shutdown when done"? It's a remote possibility, I admit, but worth checking.

Nope, I checked all those things.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Can you disable all temp sensors and such?

Yes, in the BIOS. I haven't tried that yet. Think I should? There is an option to "ignore" each sensor.

 

[screw3d]

You mean it just shut off as if someone pulled the plug? Might be an electrical issue.. trying putting it on a UPS?

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Can you disable all temp sensors and such?

Yes, in the BIOS. I haven't tried that yet. Think I should? There is an option to "ignore" each sensor.

Yeah just in case it's a weird gremlin in the mobo - it could be giving bad readings. Temp sensors are also often linked to 'panic shutdown' functions, so I'd start there now that pretyt much everything else is dealt with. You re-seated your ram, right?

Gremlins in older machines aren't all that uncommon. I have an older P3 system that started showing a 'hardware error' on bootup. It worked fine other than having to press F1 to get it to keep booting. One day I just sat in front of the BIOS and kept disabling things I wasn't using til the error disappeared. COM2 turned out to be the answer IIRC.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: screw3d
You mean it just shut off as if someone pulled the plug? Might be an electrical issue.. trying putting it on a UPS?

I have three other boxes running in the same room on the same circuit. None are experiencing this issue.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Can you disable all temp sensors and such?

Yes, in the BIOS. I haven't tried that yet. Think I should? There is an option to "ignore" each sensor.

Yeah just in case it's a weird gremlin in the mobo - it could be giving bad readings. Temp sensors are also often linked to 'panic shutdown' functions, so I'd start there now that pretyt much everything else is dealt with. You re-seated your ram, right?

Gremlins in older machines aren't all that uncommon. I have an older P3 system that started showing a 'hardware error' on bootup. It worked fine other than having to press F1 to get it to keep booting. One day I just sat in front of the BIOS and kept disabling things I wasn't using til the error disappeared. COM2 turned out to be the answer IIRC.

The funny thing is, my old Dell PII 450 upgraded to a Tualatin 1400 is chugging along just fine

I'll give ignoring the temp sensors a try right now.

 

[Amused]

OK, now all temp, fan and voltage sensors are ignored in the BIOS. We'll see how it goes.

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: Amused
OK, now all temp, fan and voltage sensors are ignored in the BIOS. We'll see how it goes.

If we keep trouble-shooting this way, eventually I'll suggest you just unplug it, and then it won't turn itself off anymore.