every time i turn my laptop on it lasts for about 8 minutes then turns itself off automatically how do i stop this

Rhiannon Gautama, April 2005

This happened to me and over a number of weeks the problem got worse. I took it to a shop to get it fixed and they told me it was the motherboard and that it would cost £135 - £180 to repair as you can pick new ones up quite cheap now I thought it wasn't worth it.
After looking for advice on the net some guy said it was due to his battery and adviced taking it out and using straight from the mains. Hey presto it worked. A new battery is £30 so that is a saving of £100+.

Michelle Butler, November 2009

Well it does the same thing to me, but I tried the "shutdown -a" method and lets see if it will turn off by itself again

Bahaeddine E., March 2008

If once it's shut down totally can you restart it straight away or do you have to wait a while ?

If you have to wait I suspect it's shutting down because the processor is overheating. This is usually caused by a lot of dust getting into the machine and eventually blocking, slowing and sometimes even stopping the fan from working. Can you hear a cooling fan or can you feel a draught coming out of the case anywhere ? My Packard Bell has to be cleaned out at regular intervals for this very same reason. Hopefully your machine just needs the insides cleaned. One piece of advice though - don't try and take it apart unless you're pretty sure you'll be able to put it back together.

If it starts up immediately but shuts off again after the same amount of time I'd start looking for rogue programs, viruses, trojans etc. Follow the previous excellent advice from Heather and you should be up and running. Hope this helps. Chris.

Chris., July 2007

That happened to me, except it was thirty seconds. Turns out it was because I had nine Trojan Horse viruses on my laptop. Going to "run" then typing "shutdown -a" (space between the n and the -) will stop your computer from shutting down on you so you can get in there with an anti virus program and clean it up. My friend used McAffee on mine. Once it's done you should be able to defrag and be okay, but be careful of disks and cd you recently burned. The virus might have attached itself to that too. And get a better antivirus program, because if viruses were the problem and you don't protect your computer better it'll happen again.

Heather, September 2005

if you are using windows go into the control panel and check the power settings

aa, April 2005