[SOLVED] Laptop Turns off completely unexpectedly

[dylan420]

I have convinced my girlfriend to convert to Linux. I partitioned the drives on her laptop as follows 4GB swap, 55GB /home, 55GB /
First I tried PCLinuxOS LXDE 2010.12, and next KDE 2010.12. I selected to option "Media Check" on both live cd's before booting them.
LXDE seemed to install correctly. It has powered itself off unexpectedly several times. With the KDE live cd, the machine power off while I was clicked "Done" in partitioning the drives in the draklive installer. The system specs are below. I would like to run KDE 2010,12 on this machine if possible. Is the laptop capable of running KDE 2010.12 ?

Acer Aspire 5315-2013
Intel Celeron Processor 540
1.86GHz, 533 MHz,
1GB DDR2 RAM
120GB Hard drive

[muungwana]

55GB for / is way too much, when u repartition in, put 20GB, she will most likely never fill up 20GB in /, anything more and its just a waste.

Do you use the laptop off the battery or while connected to an electric out let?

how good is the computer battery? the electric cable?

[dylan420]

It is plugged into an electrical outlet, battery monitor widget is reading 100%. I am repartitioning now to what you recommended.

[dylan420]

I have repartitioned and installed the O.S. I am now going to start the "laptop mode" daemon at boot from pclos control center/manage system services.
I will then reboot, upgrade synaptic, reboot, and continue, I will repost.

[dylan420]

I won't rule that out it does get warm, not too bad, I have recently cleaned the fan. Although it wasnt hot the last time because it had been off for a few hours before i began the OS change.

[dylan420]

After installing some packages and configuring them the laptop shutdown again. I believe the problem is the heat. I am checking the bios.

[dylan420]

im not seeing any options in the bios.

[ElCuervo]

Do you see any temperature monitors in the BIOS? If they are there, you can probably also set up gkrellm to monitor temps while you're in the OS - then you'll know for sure.

[horusfalcon]

You might want to take a look at this:

http://www.laptops-drivers.com/acer-notebooks/reduce-overheat-problem-into-acer-aspire-5315.html

Have you tried to update the BIOS on your machine yet?  It looks kind of like that might be what's needed (or at least it would be a good start).

Be careful with BIOS upgrades!  Make sure you have a fully charged battery and an AC power adapter connected and powered before you start.  Some (notably Acer's) BIOS flash utilities are OS-Specific, so make sure you get the right one, and be ready to re-install your original OS for long enough to use it to flash your BIOS.  If you lose power in the middle of a flash upgrade, bad stuff tends to happen.

You could always verify the temperature readings first by installing a desktop monitoring widget like System Monitor (for KDE-4).  I wouldn't be surprised if overheating is what is shutting your system down, though.  A real "tell" for this is if the time interval becomes progressively shorter from "cold start" on subsequent restarts.

Hope you find an answer before a CPU fries on you - that can be no fun at all.

Later On,
D

Additional Tags:  {PCLOS 2010.12 KDE-4 Netbook BIOS Temperature}

[T6]

I have convinced my girlfriend to convert to Linux. I partitioned the drives on her laptop as follows 4GB swap, 55GB /home, 55GB /
First I tried PCLinuxOS LXDE 2010.12, and next KDE 2010.12. I selected to option "Media Check" on both live cd's before booting them.
LXDE seemed to install correctly. It has powered itself off unexpectedly several times. With the KDE live cd, the machine power off while I was clicked "Done" in partitioning the drives in the draklive installer. The system specs are below. I would like to run KDE 2010,12 on this machine if possible. Is the laptop capable of running KDE 2010.12 ?

Acer Aspire 5315-2013
Intel Celeron Processor 540
1.86GHz, 533 MHz,
1GB DDR2 RAM
120GB Hard drive

yesterday i was fixing 3 pcs, one desktop and two laptops

the two laptops were acer aspire 5315, black laptops white keyboard, celeron 2ghz and 160 gbs on ram, can't remember video card

both laptops running vista, both will turn off completely, no restart, just turn off, the owners mentioned that this was normal...

while working on it two days(had to do many things including recover some gbs of files) i experienced the situation with one of them 6 times, total shutdown

one of the shutdowns happened while running pclinux 2010.1

i found only one bis upgrade for this unit in acer website but didn't applied because if the system shuts down while upgrading bios...

the laptop doesn't overheat that much, i had a shutdown situation with very low temperature, i opened he machine and nothing was too hot, i had much higher temperatures on my netbook!

i think it is just a poor example of the quality acer has now

[dylan420]

I have add System Moniter Widget, installed gkrellm. The heat guages read high, no exact temp.
I have loaded a module to preload at boot, this is p4-clockmod. [cpufreq-info] I have gone to acer website and downloaded acer empowering technology framework and I am running it in wine. Not sure if to any avail. Although on reboot the temperature appears to have dropped 50% and is staying there.
I have ordered a laptop cooler, I have read about BIOS upgrades and obtained a product specific version from acer website. I'm not prepared to upgrade the BIOS at this point. I last week I cleaned the area of the laptop underneath, removing a square black plastic panel, I expected there to be more dust. Maybe I have not cleaned the right spot.

[ElCuervo]

The heat guages read high, no exact temp.

What the heck does that mean exactly? No one can say with any certainty that heat is your problem without hard data, so you may be barking up a completely wrong tree. Here is what gkrellm looks like on this box, and while it shows high temperature, it certainly isn't high enough to shut down the machine.



Also, the BIOS usually shows what temp will shut down the machine, and on most of my machines that can even be adjusted within a narrow range.

In any case, I would certainly try to determine the EXACT operating temperature at the time of shutdown before I went crazy with BIOS updates, tools in Wine, etc.

[T6]

"I have read about BIOS upgrades and obtained a product specific version from acer website. I'm not prepared to upgrade the BIOS at this point"

i was thinking on doing the same but there is a problem ,the laptop shuts down any moment and if you update bios and one of those unexpected shut down situations happen your laptop will become into spare parts immediately

bios updates are a delicate situation

i opened one of those laptops i mentioned, i didn't found enough dust to worry about it and touching chipset, video card and cpu i couldn't find enough temperature to worry about it

it is just faulty hardware, seems to be something common form all the 5215 series sold in 2008, i found many reports of this problem with different symptoms including BSOD on vista, restarts, system hangs and black screens at random moments, also in windows 7

it is a bad laptop    fortunately it wasn't expensive and replace it shouldn't be that painful, after all it is just a celeron

[coffeetime]

What's the actual temperature of your laptop? Try:

Code:

acpi -t

+

Code:

cpufreq-info

and post back.

I must agree with T6 regarding BIOS update. It's very simple, but in your case as T6 has stated, it could be very tricky. What ever you do, be careful.

[bicol_willem]

Ehh .... ran memtest lately?  Especially direct after a shutdown?