Thinkpad just turns itself off

[synapse]

Hi-

I have a T42p which is only about a month old and I just started having problems with it shutting ifself off all of a sudden. No error messages, no "Windows is shutting down or performed an illegal operation", it just turns itself right off and I get a black screen. I am using IE, Outlook 2003, and Money 2004 when this happens. It has happened about twice already today. I am also using a MiniDock though it happened once or twice before when I was not using the MiniDock and I am not sure what programs I was running. I am not really sure what anyone can do to help me but this is really annoying and I would appreciate any help anyone might have on where to start. It looks like some sort of incompatability with drivers or software to me though I don't know what it could be and haven't installed anything new recently. Your help is much appreciated, thanks-

-Dan

[mattfromomaha]

Is the cooling fan running okay? Could possibly be an overheating issue if for some reason it can't cool itself as well as it needs to. Is anything obstructing the air vent on the machine?

Do you know how to look through the Event Viewer to check for programs or processes terminating unexpectedly? Check there and see if anything seems out of the ordinary. It may be a software conflict, as you mentioned.

Third, it could possibly be bad RAM or a bad processor (or I suppose a system board?). If the first two items above don't produce any results, consider having the ram and processor swapped out. Do you have onsite service or mail-in? Are you comfortable replacing the items yourself? Either way, if you call IBM and explain the situation and your steps to resolve the problem and since it's not a cooling issue or a software issue, you suspect possibly a bad processor or bad RAM and since you're such a busy guy you would like to just swap both of them out now and hopefully that will fix the problem, they should be able to accomodate your reuqest.

Good luck!