What is happening with this laptop?

First, the specs:

This is a Gateway Model MA3 or MT6451 (both are on the back of the computer).

It is running Windows Vista Home Premium SP2, 32 bit.

Processor: AMD Turion 64 X@ TL-50 1.6GHz
RAM: 2 GB

This is my uncle's laptop. A couple of months ago, it was coming on, then turning back off almost immediately. I recommended a new battery. The new battery completely solved the problem until the other day, when the computer began doing the same thing again.

He called me again, after he had tried to start the computer a couple of times, and System Restore (or Startup Repair?) came up and said that Windows had not started properly, would he like to attempt to return it to a previous working state? So he did that, and brought it to me. It's actually been fine since I got it.

I know all to well how many problems can have the symptoms that this one has.

How can I find out why it had to repair/restore? And whether this is an issue that is likely to show up again?

Thank you!!!

 

What do you see in the event viewer? Any chance not thinking he let the battery run down causing the issue?

 

Oldphil, I cannot thank you enough for your speedy response!

I have had a reply all ready to go for some time now, but I am now experiencing an internet outage for some unknown reason. I have done all the reset stuff on my end, but to no avail. I am currently on my husband's work IPad, and I cannot imagine retyping that whole thing into this touch screen. No USB port on this thing!

I have saved my reply. I shall post it in the morning. Hopefully, anyway... As long as I have internet back.

Thank you again, very much!

 

Aha! I think internet is back!

He tends to leave the laptop plugged in, since it will suddenly shut off with no warning if the battery runs too low. I'm looking for a battery utility that will give a warning to him as the battery approaches that point, so he doesn't lose work.

My initial thought was, "Ah, perhaps he needs a new power supply..." and then I remembered it's a laptop. I don't know much about laptop anatomy, so I don't know whether they have a power supply that can go bad like that.

Now for the event viewer. In Administrative Events, in the several days leading up to the problem, he got two Time-Service warnings (Event ID 134) a day. I'm guessing that he didn't have the computer online when it tried to check the time. It tried twice, a second or two apart, and then waited until the next day. This is what it says: "NtpClient was unable to set a manual peer to use as a time source because of DNS resolution error on 'time.windows.com,0x9'. NtpClient will try again in 15 minutes and double the reattempt interval thereafter. The error was: No such host is known. (0x80072AF9)"

That happened, with no other events in Administrative Events, on the 14th, 15th, and 16th. It happened again on the 17th, but then late that night, I find this error from Eventlog (Event ID 1108) twice, the very same second: "The event logging service encountered an error while processing an incoming event published from Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing."

The 18th, nothing but the two Time-Service warnings -- but this time, they're 8 hours apart.

The 19th, the day all the stuff happened, I have nothing until night-time, but the issue described above occurred in the afternoon. It stars with two Time-Service warnings. Then, a couple minutes later, an error from Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider (Event ID 7011): "A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the avast! Antivirus service." Two hours later, two more Time-Service warnings. Finally, an hour after that, a warning from VLAN-AutoConfig (Event ID 4001): "WLAN AutoConfig service has successfully stopped."

There is nothing in the App Error Events after March 31st, until it logged some entries yesterday and today (a VSS error 8194, a .NET Runtime Optimization Service error 1101, and the rest various errors from Search).

Did I give you the info you were looking for?

 

I have not tried this as Toshiba comes with a monitor, read and see what you think.

http://users.rcn.com/tmtalpey/BattStat/

 

That looks like a nice utility! I think I'll download it and play with it a bit. Thank you!

 

Looks quite good let us know!

 

I'll be downloading it in just a minute here.

Did the Event Viewer tell you anything? I never found a minidump file. Any ideas on how to figure out what happened, so I can make sure it doesn't happen again?

 

BattStat has made it to Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/batt-stat/

I'm liking it so far... though I don't see an option to have it warn you when the battery charge gets to a certain %. But I'll keep playing with it.

Just about fainted when I saw it measuring the CPU around 70*C -- at idle! Looked at it with Speccy, and it's reading about the same. Max temp for the CPU is 95*C. I had to calm myself down and remember it's a laptop. I'm used to desktops. But I know laptops run hotter. I think this still has to be high. I think I'll blast it out with some canned air.

That still doesn't speak to the issue, though. The laptop had been off all night before it refused to power up, and then came up with the repair thing. So it wasn't hot at the time.

 

I'll be cleaning the laptop out today... I still have today to work on it, but I have to give it back tomorrow, I think. If you have any other ideas how I might find out what happened, I appreciate it. If not, then I'll just hope it was overheating.

 

I poked around for a solutions to the Event ID's, there were several fixes by Microsoft one of which was to restore to a date prior to the issue. Do you know if that was done? If so you will need one of the more knowledgeable folks up here to assist you.

 

Well, it was done just a few months ago, and then yes, it was done this most recent time. When he finally got it to boot up, a screen came up that wanted to do either a system restore or repair. My uncle used both words, and I don't know which it actually was (I was on the phone with him, and having trouble figuring out what was going on). Whatever it did, it booted after that, and then I got it from him.