[RESOLVED] XP laptop shuts down

I've got a Gateway T1620 laptop that was new last November. It came with Vista Home Premium and I've set up a dual boot with XP Pro as XP runs the programs I use much better.

The last 3 weeks or so XP will just suddenly shut down. Sometimes several times a day. Vista, I've found, doesn't have the problem and can be run all day without a problem.

I also get the sudden shutdowns while running Norton Ghost 2003 from a USB stick and when running MEMTEST86 from another USB stick.

Things I've tried:

I thought maybe I had a corrupted video driver in XP so I replaced XP from a Ghost image I had from January. This is when I found the machine would shut down running Ghost. And running Ghost from a USB stick eliminates the OS as the source of the problem.

With the Ghost image successfully put on the partition, the shut downs continue.

Then I thought maybe I had the start of a failing hard disk in the XP partition and created another primary partition at the end of the drive and put XP there. The problem remains.

I've tried testing the memory but it won't run long enough to really come to any conclusions. Although Memtest86 shuts it down faster than anything else.

So It seems to me that I've got a hardware problem but Vista, on the same machine, continues to run fine. Or at least as fine as I've ever seen it run.

So I'm stumped, any suggestions would be appreciated.

TIA

I'd say that this is most likely memory. It could be that Vista, for whatever reason, just isn't using the bit of memory that has the problem, or at least not for anything important. As Memtest won't run, try this one:

Windows Memory Diagnostic

Try using the memtestors from a cd. Use another usb port for you stick.

MemTest doesn't use any Windows video drivers, so they are probably not the problem. WHat happens when running MemTest? Does the laptop simply simply power off? If so, it could be an overheating problem.

Thanks for the input and sorry it took so long to get back here. I finally got a day off work (18 days working in a row) and I've been able to experiment with it.

Based on your responses I decided that RAM was the most likely culprit and with some experimenting I discovered its possible to seat the sticks not quite correctly. (I had a different problem a couple months ago where I suspected the RAM) After sorting that I've now been unable to get it to shut down with Memtest86.

So for now I'm going to consider this solved.

Thanks again.

Yes, ram can be right tricky to get seated right in a laptop.

Thanks for posting back, was getting curious.

DVOM, above your first post is Thread Tools, you too can mark it Resolved in there.

I had all kinds of bizarre problems when I incorrectly seated memory in a network printer,. which also used SODIMM modules. They sure can be tricky to put in properly :(

Glad to hear that you got it all sorted out :)