hardware failure?

Hi, I've been having an intermittent boot up problem with my laptop for a few months. Most of the time it is fine but occasionally it will suddenly shut down and will then only partially reboot during numerous attempts. Eventually, it will boot up fully and work as normal. I know my battery is knackered because the laptop has been connected to the mains for 6 years, could that be the cause?

Sadly, you didn't tell us anything about the notebook. Your specs under your name says Windows 7, but you indicate this notebook is at least 6 years old. Windows 7 came out less than 4 years ago.

I know my battery is knackered because the laptop has been connected to the mains for 6 years, could that be the cause?

It could but my first thought when I hear about intermittent and sudden shutdowns is heat. You need to unplug from the wall and remove the battery, open every access panel, cover and cavity and thoroughly clean out the heat trapping dust that has been drawn in by the cooling fans. If you don't have access to a air compress fitted with an inline moisture and particulate filter, you can buy cans of compressed dusting gas at Radio Shack or most electronics/computer sections of your local discount department store. You also need to ensure the fans are spinning. You should feel air movement and heat being exhausted out the vents.

Have you scanned for malware?

What are your temperatures? You can use a program like Speccy from the makers of CCleaner. It includes a great option to "publish" your system specs (less any personal information). This will help us too since you didn't tell us anything about your system specs, except it is 6 years old. Speccy provides a convenient link to post that info to forums for easy review.

Download, install and run Speccy
When the scan completes, click on File > Publish Snapshot,
Click Yes,
Copy provided link
Click Close.
Return to forum post, right-click in the post text field and select Paste to copy clipboard contents (link) into your post.

Happily, I have now included my laptop specs. I have cleaned out any dust there was (not much as I did it a couple of months ago) and I did a full malware scan which identified a few bogeys which are now gone. I have noticed that the fan seems to work a bit intermittently which may be normal but I haven't had any shut downs for three days. Below is my Speccy snapshot.

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/2mXgMhH1VyjFIa66Hk2CoSz

This highest temp I saw was 51°C so no problems there. Lets hope it holds.

Hi, I have an Acer Aspire 5613 with Vista which now has another issue. I've been trying to find a solution to this problem for a couple of weeks. It started when I tried to download the latest Windows updates, they downloaded ok but when the install started the laptop hung. I have re-tried this a number of times but always with the same result. I haven't been able to switch off my laptop normally since and I have to force stop it instead. I tried running my anti-virus and malware scans but they caused it to hang as well. I switched to safe mode and managed to run the scans successfully but nothing untoward was found. At the moment, I can use the internet and email without any problem but the laptop hangs whenever I try to download anything or open the control panel. I had some over heating issues recently which caused random shut downs but I gave it a good clean and haven't had any re-occurrence of the problem since. Any ideas?

It started when I tried to download the latest Windows updates, they downloaded ok but when the install started the laptop hung.

If the problems started with the Win Update then I would be inclined to use a System Restore point created before the troublesome download (or a restore point made a few days before that, and see if that fixes the problem.

It could be a coincidence, but its always worth checking the things that happened immediately before the problem started, as it can sometimes save a lot of time.

Let us know how you get on.
Regards
paws