Hi, My Acer Travelmate 4150 laptop has suddenly started switching itself off soon after I turn it on. At most it gets as far as the windows desktop (for upto 10 secs) before just flicking off, but sometimes it barely starts booting. It seems to stay on for longer after being left off for while - then repeatedly trying to boot it results in shorter & shorted periods before switching off. Battery appears fully charged. I've tried it with battery + mains, battery only & mains only - with the same results for each. I've also tried booting straight into a different OS (using an Ubuntu live cd) and the same symptoms are displayed. No hardware has been added recently, or any significant software installs. The only change has been to start using the inbuilt wireless NIC to access my new wireless router (and adding local network file sharing) - that was working fine for a number of days prior to the issue. Immediately prior to the problem (on the prev successful use) I did disable the wireless NIC in the Acer power management profile - though I can't understand an impact from this... I can only think there might be some overheating or hardware conflict... Any ideas? Many Thanks.

If a live CD causes the same situation then I is almost for sure a hardware issue. I would take out the battery and try. Check the voltage on the PS both ac and dc. See if you can get to bios screen and leave it there. Try loading the system default or fail safe settings. All new laptops have quit a complex power setup. They all try to turn off parts of the system to protect battery power. If any of that goes bad then you could have this. Any power supply issues inside could cause this. In a very rare situation the bios could fail and may (again rare) be corrected with settings or hard reset or update to bios. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you goober.

After a few further checks (it worked much better with after cleaning/cooling with compressed air) I investigated inside & found that two of the four small bits where the heatsink clamp screwed into the motherboard had broken off (meaning the heatsink wasn't being held properly against the CPU). BTW - anyone lacking a service manual for the 4150 might find it useful to know that to get inside you need to ignore all the screws on the back & instead remove the panel above the keyboard (where the power button is) - no screws, just a bit of careful unclipping & off it comes, giving access to the rest.

acer laptop switches off, this was a great help, had the same thing, did the solder job and it worked thanks a lot.

acer travelmate 4150 i had similar problems. the heat sink is perfect and so is the thermal paste etc. now, the laptop works fine on AC adapter but on battery it randomly switches off w/o any warning. IS THERE SOME POWER MANAGEMENT IC NAMED MX-1999 WHICH GOES BAD IN MANY CENTRINO BASED SYSTEMS. IS THERE A CONCEPT OF PERIODIC RESET BY THE PROCESSOR FOR POWER CONSUMPTION HELP HELP HELP b k jha