Computer randomly shutting down

[Tygron]

Alright well... i've been having a lot of problems lately. The latest one is that my computer keeps shutting down on me. It started happening the other day when I was playing TF2 and used the on board overclocking to supposedly make my computer faster. Upon going back into TF2 my computer just turned off.

And now occasionally my computer just shuts down for seemingly no reason and it's starting to worry me and piss me off. Please help.

[avwolf]

Blow the dust out. My thinking is that the machine's probably overheating and turning itself off. That's reinforced by hearing it first happened in a game, and doubly reinforced after hearing that you're using overclocking. So blow the dust out of the video card and the CPU cooler and turn your overclocking off. What's your CPU cooler like?

[SirSlaughter]

Well. if you hava a regular pc i'm not sure what to tell you... i'm more of a laptop guy (had more experience at this) than a desktop guy. But if you hava a laptop do what av said, blow out the dust and stuff. But take out the battery and run it on the power cord by itself. if you do that the laptop runs cooler and you also save battery and laptop life due to not overheating so much. but if you're on a desktop... I can't help ya too much there... sorry.

[Tygron]

I am on a laptop, not sure sure how i'd blow the dust out though... there's really no way to do that.

[avwolf]

You might try something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ

[SirSlaughter]

You might try something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ

I love you av... not only do i know know how to clean a laptop fan, i can now disassemble a laptop and that basically means i can build a laptop from scratch sorta... and on a ranting not:
HOLY [censored] [censored]!!!! ALL THAT JUST TO CLEAN THE FAN!

[Tygron]

Yea.... i'm NOT going to take my precious laptop completely apart to clean the fan. I'm too afraid of breaking something.

[avwolf]

Okay, then here's what I'd do:

• Turn off any overclocking
• Use canned air to blow into all of the vents in the laptop case until fluff doesn't blow out of them anymore
• See if that's helped make the system more stable.

[Tygron]

Overclocking turns off when I shut down apparently, it's a thing I can go into while my computer is already on and all that. As far as canned air... I need to get some then.

[RobbieThe1st]

Yea. Don't OC a laptop - It's got bad enough cooling as it is.

Also, best way to clean a computer(any computer): 120PSI compressed air. Fire up the ol' compresser and give it all a through spraying.
It's worked for me for ages; I do that on anything that's dusty.