So for a couple days now my pc has been randomly shutting down. Although I'm not sure that's the correct term to describe the problem. Whether I'm watching a video, browsing the web the monitor goes to a black screen with the words "pc entering power saving mode" although the monitor turns off the pc itself is still on so are the keyboard n mouse I don't play any games on it so not sure if its the vid card, I've opened it up n cleaned it but no difference, updated the NVIDIA drivers v280.26, n changed the settings in power settings to "never" I'm pretty sure its not overheating but I could be wrong, am I missing something? Some specs: Windows Vista home premium, Intel Pentium dual CPU 2ghz, 2 gb RAM, NVIDIA geforce 9400 gt
Hrm, that's odd. Have you tried creating a different power plan to see if that could be it? I know you said you set it to never, but some settings might not be sticking.
Yeah I had it for best performance n switched it to balance, another note is that I did put new thermal paste, only thing I can come up with is the power supply? But wouldn't that shut down the pc?
You could also try checking the Event Viewer for any errors going on prior to the shutdown. That might help you narrow it down to something, assuming it isn't hardware related completely. Windows Key +R (or just start, run) > type in eventvwr
Many things can be accomplished by taking apart a computer and cleaning it out on the inside - especially the heatsink/CPU fan.
My first guess my be a power supply issue...or your hard drive is getting ready to die. We see that a lot here at my office. We installed custom built pc's that had Maxtor drives...and almost every single computer ended up needing the hard drive replaced. Our customers saw very erratic behavior from computer freeze ups, data corruption, odd Windows errors among others.
Your pc wouldnt go into sleep/hibernate/standby mode with a bad PS. And I've never seen one go into those modes because of a bad HD.
Did you upgrade your drivers from the NVIDIA website, or manufacturer download center? Only reason I ask is because sometimes manufacturers have special drivers that are optimized for certain hardware. I once had an issue where I would occasionally blue screen using a generic driver, vs the manufacturer shipped driver
so using problem reports and solutions i found this error: Video hardware error Description A problem with your video hardware caused Windows to stop working correctly. Problem signature Problem Event Name: LiveKernelEvent OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3 Locale ID: 1033
Event log helped you out? start> run> type in "msinfo32" (without the quotations) Type exact name and model. Navigate to the download center of the manufacturer of your PC's website. Get the latest driver from there. Most NVIDIA installations allow you to do a "clean install" of a driver. Perform that action.
Someone mentioned it earlier: try updating BIOS and maybe replace CMOS. EDIT due to not reading: See if you can put the setting back to an on-board video card if it has one?
Obviously sound like a video driver problem. It use to be "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding, but has succesfully recovered" and your screen will keeps on flickering and blacking out and now it's this.
