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Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Automatic shutdown on old machine

Every time I use firefox (or so it seems) ...my computer automatically shuts down on me. The fan suddenly cranks up to top speed and then the machine shuts down.

Now, my machine is a 10 yr old Dell Latitude. This used to happen quite infrequently that I could live with it, but the last couple of days it happens every 10 mins or so. Are there any settings that I can check to prevent this. Or maybe some software to curb the speed of the fan ?

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tavianator

Member

From: Waterloo, ON, Canada

Registered: 2007-08-21

Posts: 858

Website

Re: Automatic shutdown on old machine

Fan going crazy usually indicates heat, which could indicate that you're hitting your critical trip point and the computer's shutting down.  Are you watching your temperature when this happens?

umpalumpa1985

Member

From: America

Registered: 2007-12-05

Posts: 134

Re: Automatic shutdown on old machine

I was having a somewhat similar issue with my cpu overheating and throttling a while back.  for the little it may help, simply taking apart my case and cleaning everything with a couple of cans of power duster completely eliminated the problem, and dropped the cpu temp under load by *25* degrees!

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