Solved! Dell Inspiron 7577 randomly shutting down

[hoskle]

Hi, my Dell Inspiron 7577 just randomly shuts down. Sometimes it happens 10 seconds after turning it on, sometimes it runs for 2 hours and then shuts down. No blue screen of death, it just shuts down as if I disconnected the power.

When it's on, it works perfectly. It's as fast as it should be, I can play games no problem. I even did a hardware scan and it said everything is fine.

The shut down isn't caused by overheating, it happens even if I'm not currently doing anything and the CPU and GPU are cool.

The laptop had a dead battery that I thought might be causing issues, but I took it out and it it now runs only on power from the power adapter. The adapter works fine (I even tried a new one) so I don't see a reason for it to not supply enough power. Before anyone asks, the adapter I use is the original that I got with the laptop, the new one I tried is also from Dell and compatible with my laptop.

When the shut down happens, I need to disconnect the power adapter for a second, and then the laptop turns back on without issues.

I was browsing every forum I could find, but most replies for random shut downs were overheating or damaged battery/power adapter and that is not the case.

I also saw some people talk about a dead motherboard. I am not an expert, but I would expect there to be signs of damaged hardware when the laptop is turned on. Is it possible that the motherboard is damaged and the laptop runs fine when it's on?

Anyway, I'd be grateful if anyone has any idea what might be causing this. The laptop is about 3 years old, I'd be happy to supply additional information about it if it's needed.

 

[AlHuneke]

The interesting thing is the fact that you need to unplug the power to reset the laptop. If you hold down the power button for 20 seconds or so, will the laptop restart without unhooking power? Makes me wonder if there is an issue with internal power. A few things to try:

• The power button thing I mentioned above (this is just to gain a little more info for troubleshooting).
• Check the event viewer to see if the system logs any errors when it shuts down. Do this by waiting a few minutes after a shutdown then restart and launch the event viewer. Look for a critical error logged at the time of the shutdown.
• Run the Dell diagnostic software and let it run overnight. Your problem sounds like it could be a RAM problem except for how you have to reset it to start again.
• Get a replacement battery and see if that fixes things.

Let us know what you find out.