Testing a Laptop Power Supply

D

DigitalMP

Gawd
Joined
Jun 27, 2004
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My Inspiron 9300 powers off without warning...well, I assume anyways, as this only occurs at an idle state. It never powers off while I'm working on it, and it seems to not power off when it's in Standby mode either.

I have Standby set to initiate after 10 minutes, and most of the time when I get by to the machine, it's still in Standby. I'll fire up some music, walk into the other room to clean up, whatever, and I'll notice that it powers off after a song or two.

What can I do to troubleshoot this issue?

Thanks...
 
Yes the powersupply is separate from the motherboard. When the laptop dies does the system have any battery power? And will it turn back on and work OK right after one of the shutdown failures?
 
Thanks for the response, Doc. Since you posted that, I've tested that very scenario, And yes, the battery still has power. But -- when I boot on battery power, an error states "system clock not set, press F1 to continue, press F10 to run setup', or something similar. When I boot on AC power, that issue does not exist, and the clock is set properly.

Additionally, out of about 10 occasions (periods where I've left the machine in an idle state) since your response, all but one of them, the machine did not crash. The difference was, my external hard drive was not connect. And this could be with the HD's power on or off. But overnight last night, it powered off with no ext HD connected. And I've been running this configuration (this machine and HD) for 3+ years.

This issue began about 3 weeks ago...I reformatted in September with no issues since that time.

By the way, when I stated that I wanted to test the "power supply", I was referring to what the AC adapter plugs into on the laptop, not the AC pack itself. But it seems many refer to that as the laptop power supply, so I may be the one mistaken in that concept.

Thanks again!
 
Do you have a multitester? If you do, you could check the output of the adapter and make sure that the adapter is providing sufficient power. If that isn't the problem, then I'm quite stumped. I would think that if the AC Adapter was not providing sufficient power, then the computer would be shutting down when it was under load, not when it's idle.

Dumb question: Have you checked your power settings and made sure that they aren't telling the computer to shut down after a set amount of time?
 
Yeah, I keep the power settings pretty tight - never turn off the hard disk, only sleep when on battery, always shut off the monitor after x minutes.

As for the multitester suggestion, if the adapter wasn't providing sufficient power, after the shut down there should be no juice left in the battery, which isn't the case.

My next option I guess is to see if it shuts down while on battery, but my stock battery won't hold a charge, so I bought one off of ebay a few months ago, and the POS only lasts 20 minutes.

How might I test for overheating, as the bottom of my machine gets too hot to touch after a little while?
 
"as the bottom of my machine gets too hot to touch after a little while"

Your own statement answers your question. Too hot to touch is way to hot. Try blowing out the fans and the copper fins on the CPU cooler. You can get a laptop cooling pad but if your CPU cooler is full of junk/dust you will need this cleaned. This however doesn't explain the shutdown while not in use. Overheating issues show themselves while the system is under load. Try to boot the laptop off of a Knoppix disk or something like this and leave the system to set for a couple of days or so. This will eliminate the operating system. Even though I would guess it has to do with a driver or software issue. Go in to device manager and see if the laptop is set to turn any of the network cards off. If it is than try to disable this power saving feature and see if that fixes anything.
 
DigitalMP said:
By the way, when I stated that I wanted to test the "power supply", I was referring to what the AC adapter plugs into on the laptop, not the AC pack itself. But it seems many refer to that as the laptop power supply, so I may be the one mistaken in that concept.
Click to expand...

I guess I would just call it the AC adapter port. This port being broken is a very common problem. I don't know why laptop manufactures do not separate this port from the motherboard. It would only take attaching this port to the board with wires instead of directly soldiering it. I think I have seen a couple of Toshiba's and a Dell that use this ingenious idea. But most continue to be dumb asses. Back to the subject... You can usually easily tell this port is having an issue just by wiggling the cord with the battery out of the system. If the laptop shuts down you have a loos connection. This doesn't sound like your problem either since it is more common to wiggle the cord loos during use and not idle.
 
dr.sandman said:
"as the bottom of my machine gets too hot to touch after a little while"

Your own statement answers your question. Too hot to touch is way to hot. Try blowing out the fans and the copper fins on the CPU cooler. You can get a laptop cooling pad but if your CPU cooler is full of junk/dust you will need this cleaned. This however doesn't explain the shutdown while not in use. Overheating issues show themselves while the system is under load. Try to boot the laptop off of a Knoppix disk or something like this and leave the system to set for a couple of days or so. This will eliminate the operating system. Even though I would guess it has to do with a driver or software issue. Go in to device manager and see if the laptop is set to turn any of the network cards off. If it is than try to disable this power saving feature and see if that fixes anything.
Click to expand...

When I upgraded my hard drive a few months back I checked out the fans and there wasn't any dust inside, but I wasn't very invasive in really dismantling the case and dissecting. What else could cause this heat? It's actually been pretty hot over the course of the period that I've had this. Should I just get a cooling pad and assume that's what's necessary to address it?

And where might I find a power saving feature of that sort? Poking around in Device Manager, I don't recall any such setting, nor in Power Options.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
 
Some laptops just run hot and there isn't much you can do about it. You can get one of the laptop cooler pads and try to use it as often as you can.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...r=BESTMATCH&Description=laptop+cooler&x=0&y=0

The location of the power management for network cards can be in a few different places depending on the manufacturer and the driver version. And some NIC cards don't support this feature at all. Most of the time you can find it here.

1. Right click on My Computer and select Manage
2. In the left column select Device Manager
3. In the Device Manager window on the right expand Network Adapters
4. Right click on your network card and select Properties
4. The Power Management tab is almost always the tab that is farthest to the right
5. Repeat for both the wireless and wired NIC
6. You want to uncheck the option "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"
Hope this helps. This is the best idea I have right now. Maybe (just guessing) the system tries to put the NIC to sleep after the computer sits idle for a while and encounters a fatal exception that causes the machine to shut down?? If this is the case than upgrading your NIC driver to the latest version usually fixes the problem. "usually"
 
That option was selected for my ethernet adapter (but not available for my wireless), so I turned it off. Thanks again, stay tuned.
 
Well turning off that feature didn't resolve the matter, and the ethernet NIC's driver was current. I'm adding to my "what it isn't ", but I don't feel I'm getting any closer, and haven't ruled out the OS.

dr.sandman said:
Try to boot the laptop off of a Knoppix disk or something like this and leave the system to set for a couple of days or so.
Click to expand...

What will this accomplish? I've been taking my time in the process of creating a UBCD4Win -- is that a viable substitute? Do these boots disks have utilities to test hardware?
 
DigitalMP said:
What will this accomplish? I've been taking my time in the process of creating a UBCD4Win -- is that a viable substitute? Do these boots disks have utilities to test hardware?
Click to expand...

It will eliminate the OS as being the problem. If you boot off of a CD/DVD based operating system that loads and detects all of the hardware and the system still shuts down during idle time than you can rule out your OS and you will know that it is an intermittent hardware issue. UBCD does have hardware tests - you should try and run a test against the memory and hard drive..
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

You also need to check the event log in hopes that it's a blue-screen and is being logged.
1. Right click My Computer and Select Manage
2. In the left column expand Event Viewer
3. Look under System and Application

You will be looking for errors that occur just before the system shuts down. The errors logged can be hard to understand and a lot of the time there are common errors that will get you side tracked and will have no relevance. If you have logged errors you don't understand you can post them here and we can see if they might be the culprit. But try to only get the errors that are occurring during the time the laptop is shutting down. Also go to the laptop manufactures site and make sure all of your system drivers are up to date especially the video card.
 
EV isn't showing me any errors, only general information alerts and warnings related to TCP connection limits (and those don't concern me because this issue persists even without uTorrent running), but nothing intuitive just before shutdown.

I'm done running around in circles. I like to say that it's not always about determining what the problem is, but what it isn't. That said, I'll create my UBCD4Win and a Knoppix boot disk, and see what happens when the OS is out of the picture.

Thanks for the suggestions...I'll report back in a couple days.
 
I booted from the Knoppix CD a couple weeks ago, and it ran fine for 10+ hours, so I'm fairly certain it's OS/drivers/software.

After a shutdown last week, finally, an error was displayed upon reboot that indicates a specific driver was the reason for the spontaneous shutdown. However, the dump file was not where it was specified, so I can't find any more details. Is there any way to figure out which out of all my drivers is the culprit?

Out of every time the machine has shut down, this was the only time that I restarted and saw "...has recovered from a serious error." I clicked the details, and it mentioned a faulty driver, but not which one.

Has anyone ever had any luck with the Driver Verifier Manager? I'm wondering how invasive this tool is with regards to detecting issues with drivers, rather than just unsigned or outdated drivers. I selected a few third party drivers and rebooted, but no blue screen that this tool says would appear to indicate the culprit.

By the way, adding to the previous symptoms:

Since last report, the machine has shut down a couple times while I was using it. It's not just a here one MS, out the next MS type of thing, but it seems to take a deep breath before it powers off, as in hard drive/fan activity.

Also, I notice when viewing directories of videos, ONLY when in thumbnail view, when loading the thumbnails, the whole screen blinks on each thumbnail load.

My video adapter is NVidia GeForce Go 6800. I just DLed the driver from the Dell site (dated 2006). I'm going to reinstall it and see if that does anything.​
 
Uninstalled the old, reinstalled the newly DLed version, rebooted, walked away for 5 minutes, PC was off when I came back.

I know I should reimage, but I want to stab a bit more at this. Any suggestions?


Edit: I just turned off the Acronis, Apple Mobile, and Nero BackItUp, and Lavasoft services.
 
Go to Dell's site and update all of the drivers. Hopefully you will catch the one that's causing your headache. My best guess is video,MB chipset, NIC
If you saw some message about a specific driver than it should be listed in event viewer - try looking there again. Keep us up to date.
 
Over the course of this, no relative errors in Event Viewer, except for BTHUSB (Bluetooth radio service) failing periodically.

Since I already updated video, I'll check the others. Thanks...
 
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