Thinkpads Forum

Greetings,

I'm having this problem where my W500 shuts down unexpectedly (and I might add very quickly) in a matter of seconds, rather than the minute or two it normally takes when you do a normal shutdown. It seems to be happening when I have large processes running. Any idea how I can diagnose this? How do I tell if this is a fan issue, overheating, etc?

The following are the specs of the box:

-W500
-Vista x64 Business
-4 GB RAM
-2.8GHZ T9600 Processor
-2 Hard Drives (200GB 7200 RPM in HDD Bay, 320GB 7200 RPM in Ultrabay II slot)

I do run the machine pretty hard (SQL Server 2005 running 8GB DB's with queries running quite a bit, Visual Studio going at it, etc....). This is not an email/surfing machine.

Any advice you can offer would be great.

I had a similar problem with my W700. About every day or two it would turn off (as if the on/off button was held down until it powered off) and then it would go through a normal boot up.

I was running RAID 0, two hard drives, QX9300 processor, Vista Ultimate x64, two 320 GB 5400 drives 4 GB ram and no Intel Turbo Memory. I was able to prove that the problem only occurred with two hard drives installed. It never occurred with only one hard drive installed. The W700 does have two bays for hard drives in addition to the Ultrabay Slim and in addition to the SATA ort on the back.

It was unrelated to RAID. It was unrelated to BIOS or drivers. It was unrelated to processor temperature or graphics processor temperature. It would occur sometimes while Vista was loading, sometimes while I was reading email, sometimes while watching DVD or Blu-Ray.

Lenovo replaced my machine, and I have been using the new machine for 11 days with no similar failures. I still have my fingers crossed, though. Since the problem was intermittent, I'm not yet absolutely positive, the new one won't have the same problem. So far, so good.


I hope this helps. Let me know.