A couple of interesting PC power issues.

[Crossy]

I have two windows 10 PCs that are playing games with me, I have no idea what's going on.

 

Machine 1 is a pretty old Dell mini-tower - Hit the power button and it briefly powers on (a second or two) then turns "off", leave it for 5 seconds or so and it powers up all by itself and boots normally. The PSU died a few weeks back (it was playing this game before) and the new PSU made no difference to the behaviour.

 

Machine 2 - is a homebrew bitsa. Powers on and boots normally and runs for about 10 minutes, then does a controlled shutdown. Power it on again and it boots and will run for days.

 

Whilst neither of these quirks is a show stopper both are annoying, any bright ideas?

 

 

[JaiMaai]

Machine 1:  Have you checked the CMOS cell battery?  It may be losing BIOS settings and having to reconfigure itself before each boot...

[Crossy]

3 minutes ago, JaiMaai said:

Machine 1:  Have you checked the CMOS cell battery?  It may be losing BIOS settings and having to reconfigure itself before each boot...

 

Good thought, although it's not losing any other settings or the time I'll drop a new battery in this evening.

 

[Heppinger]

Run this, eventvwr.msc, in the Run window or hit, windows key and R , and you will be able to view the machines shutdown logs.

[Heppinger]

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/78335-read-shutdown-logs-event-viewer-windows.html

[Metropolitian]

28 minutes ago, Crossy said:

I have two windows 10 PCs that are playing games with me, I have no idea what's going on.

 

Machine 1 is a pretty old Dell mini-tower - Hit the power button and it briefly powers on (a second or two) then turns "off", leave it for 5 seconds or so and it powers up all by itself and boots normally. The PSU died a few weeks back (it was playing this game before) and the new PSU made no difference to the behaviour.

Check the memory modules, a change with memory module will give that exactly syndrom you are explaining.

A bad contact would made the machine think that there was a new module inserted.

 

Overheating would do the same (turning off after a few sec) but not powering up again.

 

28 minutes ago, Crossy said:

Machine 2 - is a homebrew bitsa. Powers on and boots normally and runs for about 10 minutes, then does a controlled shutdown. Power it on again and it boots and will run for days.

 

Whilst neither of these quirks is a show stopper both are annoying, any bright ideas?

 

As said above by others, check your event log as it was shut down 'properly'.

 

Happens here sometime and is mostly due to an update but then it would restart and not shutdown but with some settings restarts will result in an shutdown.

 

Another thing I can think of is that this one actually has issue within the PSU. After the second power-up it has warmed up already and the issue is 'gone'.

 

 

 

Some grabs in the bucket with possibilities ????

 

[pineapple01]

10 minutes ago, Crossy said:

 

Good thought, although it's not losing any other settings or the time I'll drop a new battery in this evening.

 

Id just  drop a 24 V Batter on it. Sorry Crossy but i had to Laugh. My Son took delight in showing his Chums  my old one i gave in.!. Now hes started on 3BB Cables. Yer dont have that rubbish any more, just a thing in the back of the PC that sends 3bb  all over the House. Im feeling a Tad Luddite of late.!

[johng]

Last time I had strange power problems    I swapped every single piece of the machine out one piece at a time even down to mainboard and CPU before  discovering that it was the power button...I then had except for a case a brand new PC sitting around waiting for a use ????

[Crossy]

OK Machine 2 shutdown log.

 

[Crossy]

Machine 1 CMOS battery was down to 2.6V, shiny new one installed. Booted straight up on power on, we'll know for sure if it's fixed in the morning.

 

 

[Crossy]

I THINK I may have solved Machine 2 too.

 

I have a scheduled task to shut down the machine at 6AM every weekday morning (after I've headed out to work).

 

Hunting through the task scheduler I noted that I had two scheduled tasks, one called "auto shutdown" the other "automatic shutdown" both with the same triggers. Evidently a spot of pilot error during the editing process. I've deleted one of the tasks.

 

We shall see tomorrow if this one is fixed too.

 

[Metropolitian]

36 minutes ago, Crossy said:

OK Machine 2 shutdown log.

 

Without the filters , what does the log says in the minutes before the shutdown was initiated?

[Crossy]

6 minutes ago, Metropolitian said:

Without the filters , what does the log says in the minutes before the shutdown was initiated?

 

If removal of the duplicate scheduled task fixeth it not, tomorrow checking I will.

 

[Crossy]

The new battery did NOT fix Machine 1 ????  More ideas welcomed.

 

Machine 2 seems to be behaving now the duplicate scheduled task has been removed. Touch wood!

[RichCor]

1 hour ago, Crossy said:

The new battery did NOT fix Machine 1 ????

How many daughter boards and internal peripherals can you pull out / unplug and still display boot status on a display?

 

If it's not the power supply (recently replaced, testing voltage stable) then I'd suspect something else not playing nice with the DC rails. I've encountered power-on issues from leaving USB cables plugged in with nothing attached.

[Jan Dietz]

Could be an overload on start up, maybe disk drives or fans getting sticky when cold. 

Second time 'round they'd have spun a bit and will drain less power.

 

[bestie]

My aircon powers on and off sometimes. Could be a ghost. It can run for days without a problem and then it can't stop to peep on and off. The mechanic guy replaced everything he could. But the problem doesn't disappear. It comes and goes. He gave up. I guess it's a problem with the house electricity probably some voltage differences. If I turn the room light on my Monitor goes black for a few seconds. So maybe it isn't really a problem with your 2 pcs. Maybe they don't become enough power? I don't know how to figure this out. Maybe in the bios. 

[teacherclaire]

On 9/2/2020 at 5:17 PM, Crossy said:

The new battery did NOT fix Machine 1 ????  More ideas welcomed.

 

Machine 2 seems to be behaving now the duplicate scheduled task has been removed. Touch wood!

Have you taken out your memory cards and cleaned the contacts?

 

A rubber/eraser does the trick well enough. 

 

 

[Crossy]

1 minute ago, teacherclaire said:

Have you taken out your memory cards and cleaned the contacts?

A rubber/eraser does the trick well enough. 

 

Everything that can come out has come out.

 

The machine works fine once it's running, if it were memory or dirty contacts elsewhere I would expect reliability issues, but it happily runs all day.

 

It's not a new machine so dried up capacitors could be on the list, but I'm currently too lazy/busy to mess about pulling it all apart especially as it's working ok.

[Metropolitian]

As it is an DELL, try the diagnostic utility.

 

On older PC's it's built in, F12 at boot when your DELL 'successfully' starts.

 

I have DELLs here too, same issue but won't boot at all. Only staying off.

Got a PCI diagnostic card, which was delivered to me with damaged attached LCD but has onboard LEDs which giving me some details.

Issue with one of the Dell here: The onboard power feed 'led' was lit softly, so mainboard power feed issue.

 

That PCI diag card I'm not using, and in fact I got a replacement from the seller with good LCD , which is all in Chinese 555 but giving the same information as the leds.

If you want that PCI diag card, it's yours.

 

[Crossy]

18 minutes ago, Metropolitian said:

On older PC's it's built in, F12 at boot when your DELL 'successfully' starts.

 

The basic test finds nothing awry, I'll run the full memory diagnostic later when I'm not using the machine.

 

[Mambowoman]

On 9/5/2020 at 10:13 AM, teacherclaire said:

Have you taken out your memory cards and cleaned the contacts?

 

A rubber/eraser does the trick well enough. 

 

 

That's a good idea!

 

 

[Crossy]

Well, Machine No1 is also fixed, unfortunately I don't really know why ????

 

I reset the CMOS to "defaults" after which it wouldn't boot at all. Fixed by setting boot mode to "legacy" (default is UEFI) and selecting the boot drive correctly (both were correct before anyway) and we're good to go.

 

Such is life and the mysteries of the confuser.