May I pick your brains for a minute here guys. The wife unit's laptop has been acting up on her. For no reason that she can explain it will just shut off and reboot all by itself. I thought maybe it was overheating so I changed all the power settings to help it run cooler. I also bought here a cool mat with little fans in it to help keep it cooler.

I thought I had it fixed but it has now started doing it again. She plays a lot of Sims 2 on it if it really makes any difference.

Here is the error info that she gets when it boots.

C:\DOCUME~1\OWNER~1.DEB\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER96aa.dir0 0\Mini062107-01.dmp

C:\DOCUME~1\OWNER~1.DEB\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER96aa.dir0 0\sysdata.xml

BCCode : 10000050 BCP1 : E11AF170 BCP2 : 00000000 BCP3 : BFB91AC6

BCP4 : 00000001 OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 256_1



Anyone have a clue what all this is and how to fix it?

 

Control Panel/System/Advanced/Startup and Recovery settings button. Uncheck Automatically restart. Then next time she gets an error that would restart it she will get a BSOD instead. You might get a better clue as to what's causing the problem from the BSOD.
Does it happen when she's playing Sims? If so, it's a good chance the video drivers need updating.

 

Yeah I agree if it happens during the sims probably video drivers. Although I'm not sure. Another thing i would run virus and spyware scans just to check it if you havn't already.

 

The BIOS sould be shutting itdown as well based on temperatures. I've never looked at my laptop BIOS, but my desktop has settings for temperature threshholds to reset.

 

If the bios shuts it down for temp it will shut it down, not restart it.

 

Has it ran fine running teh games at any point?

If it has

Try this

Start>run
type: %temp%
delete all the temp files, everything in that folder.

 

What kind of laptop is it?

Grim

 

It is a Gateway MX6450. I bought two of them in March of 2006. Mine has been completely trouble free where as hers has had this problem for the last couple months. I cleaned the temp files tonight so we will see what that does before I move on to updateing the drivers.

 

Has your wife ever sat on the carpet while using the computer? The heat sink on my wife's laptop was covered with carpet fiber. It had similar symptoms. You might try cleaning the heat sink, which will probably involve removing the keyboard.

Grim

 

Now that you mention it, I did blow it out a couple months ago as well. It was full of dust and crap. It may be just getting dirty again. She has a bad habbit of parking an ashtray right next to that side.

These are actually quite easy to get at. A few screws and the whole bottum comes off. I'll have to try that again and see if it helps.

 

Having problems with my Gateway also same model. I called tech service at Gateway they advised may be a hd, so shipping box on the way. I still have service contract.