Good Day Doctors,
I'm helping my friend with his HP pavilion laptop. It turns off randomly. While looking at it for an hour I notice it turning off and than rebooted. The air vents have been cleaned, when I first tried to turn it on without a/c pluged in it turned right off. I notice that the battery icon was at 100% and than it was crossed out and than it shut down. I pulled the battery out to see how long it will stay on with the a/c pluged in. At one time it stayed on for about an hour 1/2, another time it shut down in 20 minutes.


Please let me know what to look for or test to run.

This system has: Win XP home,pentium 4, 3.00ghz,384 ram

Thanks in advance
Sep17

Borrow an AC adapter & battery from someone with a similar HP Pavilion laptop to see if that might correct the problem. My bet would be on the AC adapter. Past that, the problem may be an internal hardware issue requiring (ouch) repair by an authorized HP repair facility. As a side note, is it always plugged into the same wall receptacle? Try another receptacle.

Thanks for the quick reply bones252100,
Do you know of a way that I can test my battery?

A voltmeter can be used to check the voltage level of its present state. Voltage specs are typically displayed on the battery. Even though the voltage may match the specifications listed, this does not mean that the battery is good. Rechargeable batteries (especially nickel-cadmium) can develop memory. They will charge to the expected voltage level but will not hold that charge for very long. The best test is still substitution with a known good part. A reverse test is to place that battery into another HP Pavilion laptop & see if the problem follows the battery.

Also, there are many issues with windows xp that can cause the laptop to reboot/power off. Try pressing pause or booting from a bootable cd just to see if the laptop still powers off. If it does then you definitely have a hardware problem. If not, I would recommend formatting the hard drive and reloading windows as there were a few viruses/trojans which caused those symptoms.

Usually this problem comes when bad virus corrupted the operating system files and when, we reboot out computer then, it restart randomly or shows some file is missing.
So, get the recovery CD of your operating system then try to get repair and if it not possible then, install the fresh window.