Laptop doing emergency shutdown instead of sleep

[doppelkorn]

So my laptop has been doing this for a few months:

 

Whether plugged in or on battery, it will do an emergency shutdown/unexpected shutdown sort of thing whenever it tries to sleep.

 

For example, if I close the lid to put it to sleep it doesn't sleep, it shuts down but not properly so when it comes back on (by having the power button pushed) it says "Windows has recovered form an emergency shutdown". The same happens if it goes to sleep after the pre-determined period of being on (which I have set to 5 hours).

 

Sometimes, however, it doesn't do this and behaves normally but only for a day or two, then it's back to being arsey.

 

It's a Dell Studio 1555 and is three+ years old. Apart form this little glitch it works fine and is still fairly fast.

 

I can't work out at all what's causing it

[Steve]

There's a lot of potential causes of this man. I would start with....

 

1. Make sure Windows is fully up to date via Windows Updates.

 

2. Make sure any drivers are fully up to date. Buggy graphics card drivers are a common cause of the issue you're having.

 

3. If it's still the same after doing 1 and 2 and rebooting, try running System File Checker via an elevated command prompt (sfc /scannow). If you're wary about this tool making changes to your system, you could try running it with the /verifyonly switch instead, as that will only tell you if there's a problem - it won't actually replace any files.

 

If that doesn't help, then try doing some deeper investigation. Go to this folder: -

 

C:\Windows\Minidump

 

If there are any .dmp files in there, get rid of them. Use the computer and try and force the error or just wait until it happens again. Go back to that folder and there should be a new .dmp file in there. You can use a free tool such as BlueScreenView to analyse the .dmp file: -

 

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

 

That will tell you the name of the offending process/files which will help you find a solution via a Google search.

 

 

 

 

[doppelkorn]

Cheers bro, I'll try these out in sequence after tomorrow night's gig.

 

The graphics card one is one that came up when googling actually but I assumed it wouldn't apply to me as I've not got an aftermarket (i.e. non factory spec) card.

[Kian]

check power scheme. change windows lid close to do nothing instead of sleep or hibernate