Laptop swithces itself off!!

Hi there,

For the last 3 or 4 months, my laptop has been randomly switching itself off. It is quite infrequent and only seems to happen when the cpu usage is at 100% for more than 10/15mins.

It works fine with almost every program, except TmpgEnc and one or two other cpu intensive programs.

Having called my manufacurer's tech support I was advised that I had 'fried' the motherboard and will need to buy a new one costing more than £400!!

The computer, however works fine 90% of the time......could it be something else, less serious??

It might be worth mentioning that around the time that it first happened, something happened to my battery that caused it to

1.Lose all power
2.Says - (charging 80%) on the icon all the time

I can now only run the computer from the mains!!

If anybody has any thoughts it would be appreciated

Thanks.

Power surge?
The shutoffs and such under high load sound like a heat problem. Check that you hear the fan spinning when it should. Might need to take it to the shop to be sure. I don't think it sounds like the mobo.

Thanks for the reply!!

I personally thought that it was probably just a broken fan or something similar.

The people on the tech support line were pretty useless and I got the impression that they just wanted me to buy a new mobo!!

If I take my laptop to a shop and they too decide that I need a new mobo - do you think I would get it back in the same condition as I gave it to them if I decided against replacing it??

As I said in my previous post programs such as Dreamweaver, Word and other programs that I use for my university course work 100% of the time....its only the cpu intensive ones that make it crash/switch off.

In a worst case scenario, if these programs still worked, then I wouldn't want to splash out on a new mobo!!!

Iv'e been worried that if I take it to a shop and they can't fix it without replacing the mobo that I'll be stuck with a computer that can't do anything at all.

I would think that it would work the same when you got it back, though handling and work could possibly screw something up if the mobo is hanging on to usability by a thread. I'm not sure why tech support thought that though, it doesn't seem to fit. Usually mobo problems do things like prevent booting, or crash it regularly, not tied to cpu load.