[trahnnep]

I am quite perplexed with this one. After booting up into WinXp, the system shuts down after a few minutes but hard drive is still on. The plenum fan and cpu fan stop and assume motherboard power loss when this occurs. Depressing power button for few seconds turns power off all way. Turn power on again and after a few more minutes in xp, it shuts down again.

I have replaced the powwer supply as suggested in forums.techguy.org/t346522.html to no avail. Shutdown continues. Now here's what's perplexing: If I boot from floppy, it stays up. It also stays up while running Powermax scan.

I even placed the same hard drive in another computer as the slave and had no problems accessing it.

Why would it shutdown only in Windows XP? Any guessers out there?

Thanks,
trahnnep

[winbob]

Well here comes a guess from out of Left Field...check your Power Options in Window's Control Panel.

Is the machine set to go into Hibernate or Standby on a short time frame?

Any other power OFF settings allocated there?

Ideally, this should NOT affect you while the machine is in use, but only when left idle. Hey, but, "who knows what evil lurks in the hearts and minds of men?"

[Triple6]

Could be a virus or a driver problem. Can you boot Windows XP in Safe Mode? Can you run a virus scan on it?

[trahnnep]

Thanks for the replies. That's one of the first things I checked and it's set to the home/office setting where it doesn't hibernate or sleep at all. I've also substituted the hard drive with a new one and commenced to install WinXP when lo and behold in the device installation phase, it shut down again. In fact, I can't seem to get past that point due to shutdown.

So it can't be a virus or device driver problem on a fresh install. I've also removed all of the other cards in the system so it's bare bones and am not running into a device that's gone bad. Really stumped.

[qldit]

G'day trahnnep, I haven't seen that exact description it sounds really wierd.
Maybe checking all your BIOS settings, chances are the processor overheat trip is set ridiculously low or something like that. But that normally trips the entire power.
I have struck a crook P4 that did silly things that were supposed to be impossible so you never can tell. It could be worthwhile getting a copy of a simple Linux distro like Lormer or Fedora and giving that a try, memory problem maybe.
These distros have excellent hardware detection capability and can often pick up
odd problems. You could also try the Mtest.
A cleaninstall problem like that is usually pretty fatal for something hardware related.
Cheers, qldit.

[LRogers]

I had the same problem. After switching out hard drives, and came to the same outcome, I checked other forums, and found one post. I'm sorry I don't have the link, but the gist is this. Leaking, corroded, or mushroomed capacitors. Found them on my motherboard, the five lining the CPU.