Random OS shutdowns

[Six Of One]

Hi, you educated lot of computer buffs,


a friend of mine has an odd problem with her computer. After bootup the machine runs for 5 to 10 minutes and then shuts down. She is running Win95 OSR2 and that's about all that i know. I promised her to take a look at it but i am utterly clueless what even might cause such behaviour. I only know computers that refuse to shut down...

Any idea?

Regards

[Wulfman]

first thoughts:

power supply?
overheating cpu -> auto - shutdown (is that possible with win95?)?

mfg
wulfman

[Six Of One]

Thanks for your answer, Wulfman. I don't know either. I am currently looking fr similiar problem descriptions in several other fori and the general internet, to no avail.

Please, keep it coming.

Regards

EDIT: Just remembered a tidbit. She said that if she starts in safe mode the system will not shut down. I remember that i concluded therefore that it might be a driver issue.

[Chucky Cheese]

six of one,

try checking the properties of her power management system. if your up to it check in the bios, then in control panel. you'll be looking for any setting that looks like it would issue a command that would cause this behaviour.

it has been so long since i've looked a win95 interface i can't really recall where to send you there.

good luck

cc

[Six Of One]

Thanks all

Thank you for your input Chucky. I have been to her place yesterday and took a look at the system (it's an old Pentium 66 MHz with 32MB of RAM, haven't seen something like this for quite some time now )

Well, i somehow fixed this issue. I'm not sure how. I first ran the usual routine of resetting the BIOS to Default and deactivating all powermanagement settings (there weren't that much...) Then i cleaned the system with the usual tools like RegHeal and stuff. After that i removed the IE with IEradicate and ran RegHeal again. After that i used Windows tools like Scandisk (which discovered several bad sectors at the end of the HD) and defragmented it. After that i was confident that the system was in as good a shape as was possible. I ran several test utilities like ctRAMtst (a RAM test routine) and finally started a session of Prime95 to see what happened. After some hours and lots of coffee the system was still chucking away happily.

I asume that after 5 years (that's how long she is owning the PC) without maintenance the system was simply on its knees and needed some care. I advised her to run some maintenance routines once in a while and i hope that the issue is settled.

Thank you all again for your input.

Best regards