something's wrong here. i formatted, reinstalled, and now the computer simply shuts down. I'm talking off, out, kaput, end of story shutdown, as if someone pulled the plug out of its... ahem... behind. Sorry, I've been using another term while kicking it around the house. Something tells me it's the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 card. It's never happened to me before. BUT LAPPY GOT PWNED!!! :( Drac (annoyed and restless in Seoul)

I bet the poser forum hacked in. Have you pissed anyone off recently? Sorry, not helping much, but a hardware expert I'm not.

i wouldn't consider the poser-ites smart enough... kidding. and i'm a politics major. i can't help not piss people off. Drac

have you defibrilated the interositer, usualy solved by a bic two-four-three formation....... (although i may be making this stuff up.)

defibrilates rj phillistines... Drac

Speaking more in the way of empathy than diagnostics but I had black-screen-of-bad-motherboard-itis a couple of years back. Frustrating but at least it was under warranty/sc. Dell threw three replacements (refurbs..) into it before finally just sending a whole new laptop.

euh. that's scary :/ drac

time to get the pencils out

Yup. A comp simply shutting itself down is Not A Good Sign. Can you boot in Safe Mode?

ok..now that I reread the part about the laptop being gone, it could be a faulty power supply. Depends on the circumstances..another thing to check is how far it gets into the boot process, past POST, into the OS, up to Bryce? Any weird beeps or error codes, etc? Another possibility is the temperature setting on the system board bios, had a PC do a swan dive into doorstop status whenever the temperature got up too high (but usually you'll get alarms with that). I think most modern computer OS's have a 'log' feature, that you can capture what has loaded vs what hasn't, at least I know Linux and the later Windows versions do..I'd contact the manufacturer's tech support, that's what they get paid for.

I've got a problem too, since last November, err. My computer indescrimanently decides to shut down and restart with no warnings. I've cleaned the harddrive, its been reformatted (too many times to count) its not a virus. It usually happens in conjunction with playing music. Doesn't matter what music program or if its off a cd or the harddrive. And occassionally it'll happen without the music playing. Its very fustrating. Happened a lot when I had Bryce loaded then not so much when I installed the Bryce patch, but I just can't pin down what's causing it to happen. And to make matters worse it will sometimes only close out of a program, ie just psp or just mozilla. And sometimes it will give an error message, although I haven't gotten one of them in several weeks. Its like its possessed. This is one of those pieced together PC's and I've already gotten the motherboard replaced 3 times, don't have a clue what to do now, so I feel for ya Drac. At least if its from a company they should be able to fix it up for ya. Ang

thank you all. the comp doesn't restart. it just shuts down. completely. it's a laptop, so i know giving it to render something with a light dome IS pushing it, but it's been able to pull it off before. there's no error messages in the administrative tasks or whatever it's called, which leads me to believe that it's a hardware issue of some importance. drac (ang, from the sound of it, your sound card is screwed up)

Can you describe the noises it makes in the three seconds between your powereing up till it quits? 8) And if it is three seconds or less, oh yea -it's spanked... And what are you on now your PDA?

it doesn't make ANY sounds. the mobo just loads up its usual batch of (extended) tests, everything is fine, and I can restart it. Windows boots up normally, no problems, etc. so i'm writing it from the computer in question. His name is Lappy. And he's a cheap 5 dollar hoe. Drac

Do you have a good rollback config saved that you can go to? (sternly) Don't make me have to talk to you about good configuration managment young man. (When mine went all I got was the sound of drive starting to come up to speed, a click, and then the sound of it winding down.)

My baby (laptop, Siemens-Fuj.) did the same a week ago when I started to render in Bryce (became terrible hot and shot down) so I lifted the rear and under it I placed some pieces of metal for better cooling; now it works well.

hmmm... that might actually be an idea... thanks attileus miller, i don't back up my stuff. hell, i don't even save my works on the hard drive. drac

Well, once a month, more or less, it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to go to 'control panel/performance and maintenance/system restore/create restore point' and create one...

Maybe a power management issue, or a faulty battery/power supply as pakled suggested. Are you certain you have all of the correct drivers installed for your vid card?

If Bryce crashes the computer 1/3 to midway in a render then it's probably this. If not, then you can disregard the post as it's something else... Bryce likes processor cycles doesn't it? What does heavy processor usage do to the processor? Hmmm... Yeah, it gets nice and hot. Doesn't it? What do some of the newer 'puters do when the processor gets too hot? They shutdown to protect themselves. Theres a few ways to fix this (mostly for desktops.) One is to adjust the processor temp limits/reduce clocking/or disable protect via BIOS (if it lets you.) (AMD seems to run a bit hotter, but they're also a bit more tolerant of heat too.) The other is to get more cooling fans. One more I can think of is to have a case w/ high airflow, or remove the cover and have a desk fan cool the thing while rendering. And perhaps moving to a cooler room is the last option. Other things I could think of with a laptop are power management issues (cycles down if "inactive") and a bad cell if on battery power (battery shows up fine on power meter, but doesn't last worth **** because of the bad cell.) Might also want to check the memory too, sometimes they can get loose if not plugged in all the way.

Another idea: if you render and the proc. gets too hot (check the rear) place the laptop on a few cans of cooled coke/beer :-) - it did the job for mine when it shut off suffering from overheating...

system restore is the first thing i disable when i reinstall windows and there's nothing anyone can say that will make me waste 3 gigs out of a 30 gig drive and 30% slowdown of most computer functions just so i can have a safe puter. moving on... right now the bottom of the comp is hot as hell. it's a p4. and it's plugged in. i need to find a way to monitor and reduce the cpu thing. preferably find out if this thing has speedstep or not. drac (thank you all again)

i just came back from the dell forums. apparently it's a design flaw with dell 5100s. the heatsink gets clogged with dust. pure and simple. thank you all for your generous help :) drac

All that navel lint probably doesn't help matters (sternly) don't make me have to talk to you about good personal hygene...

lol@dd

Let me tell you what happened to me.... When I got my new PC and the ATI All in wonder my PC would just shut down without warning,Took it back and they put a new hard drive in.Tried a new powersource.When I took it home, that all stopped.Also I believe he got an update on the driver for the ATI card. Been good so far.

Attached Link: Mother Board Monitor.

I have seen Bryce do exactly what you describe Drac. Both the symptoms and the sudden onset after faithful service. The problem was the graphics card and it was precipitated by installation of Mojo World. Mojo World was not the culprit, merely the catalyst. New graphics hardware solved the problem instantly and the old card work fine with Bryce and Mojo World in another PC. Ensure you face east when installing the new card......

lol

Bah, using my name in vain again are you? Yeah, sounds like an overheating problem. Not as a permanent solution, but as a test, you might want to underclock the CPU/ram in the bios. If it no longer crashes, you atleast know what the problem was. In a pre-built laptop they usually make sure there are no hardware conflicts, so I wouldn't think it would be the graphics card (unless it's busted or something). Anyway, sounds like overheating. You could also run one of those cpu cooker tests and see if it restarts then. That would test for system instability in overheating without using the graphics adapter in the same way. Hope it gets better. Oops, just read the above message about the heat sink... Well... uh. Looks like that mystery is solved!

Attached Link: http://www.frozencpu.com/cgi-bin/frozencpu/cpa-68.html

For the real cooling people:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20031230/index.html

Looks at link provided by Rayraz Ummm, now if only there's somebody out there willing to give me the parts and continuously supply me with liquid N2. Heheh... Literally cool if not definitively so, but dunno if it's all that practical for everyday use. :)