I have a macbook running osx 10.4.11. Yesterday it randomly shut down. I figured it had overheated, so I left it off for awhile and it was fine the rest of the day. Today it has done the same thing several times.

it's not overheating. I have a widget that monitors internal temperatures. I haven't downloaded or installed anything new in the past few days. I haven't dropped it or spilled anything on it. I have almost 60 gigs of free space. I haven't been running several applications at once. I haven't really been doing anything that I haven't been doing in the 2.5 years I've owned it.

I did clean it the other day, but I used alcohol swabs. Before I cleaned it I took the battery out and then I just wiped it down with the swabs, which is pretty much what the apple web site recommends for cleaning anyway.

does anyone have any ideas what could be making my computer shut down without warning?

Not knowing the model of Macbook I am not sure check the apple site I found this (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1599) for the 13 inch Macbook

I found the same information, unfortunately it doesn't apply to me. I bought my macbook in April 2007, and the update on the apple web site does not apply to macbooks made after late 2006.

I have a macbook 2.1

does anyone have any ideas what could be making my computer shut down without warning?
No, but your Mac does, did you check the event log?

this is the only information it's giving me on why it shut down, which means nothing to me. I know very little about computer coding *shrugs*

2009-08-17 15:39:38.497 loginwindow[67] FSResolveAliasWithMountFlags returned err = -43
2009-08-17 15:39:43.713 loginwindow[67] FSResolveAliasWithMountFlags returned err = -43
2009-08-17 15:39:43.851 loginwindow[67] FSResolveAliasWithMountFlags returned err = -43

the rest are all things I've told it to do, or actions applications automatically take on their own.

-43 error points to a missing file what file well they never tell you. Try to reload your OS

It seems to have fixed itself. The last few days it hasn't shut itself down at all.