Won't shut down, hard to get back on again

**seian** · June 29th, 2005, 12:54 PM

Hi, I found this place when googling for answers, and I hope someone can help me. I'm not an expert in any sense.

In the last week I've had an impossible time shutting the computer down. It gets to the last stage when the screen goes black, but a cursor is left blinking, and then sometimes I get bursts of colored squares flashing across the screen. The fans continue to run, and the four lights inside the box which appears to mark the status of the machine turning off and on turn red and stay lit. Sometimes the CD-RW drive read light will blink for a minute or so. I have to turn it off at the surge protector to get it to shut down.

I have an AMD 1.4G with 500+ of RAM, running Win 2000 Pro.

Some background: When I first upgraded from 98 to 2000, I had an issue with Roxio software that wouldn't let it shut down. I switched to Nero and it sorted it out. I don't know if it's related.

But I never had the range of effects as I'm having now. The only software that's been updated in the week that this happened was Quicktime and the latest windows fixes. I reinstalled both, to no improvement. I can't tell if it's software or hardware or both, though, as I even have a hard time starting it up again. This morning I had to unplug all my peripherals just to get it to boot up. I added things back one by one, and found I need to leave my USB scanner unplugged to get the machine to boot up again.

Can't shut down still after the various reloading efforts, and hibernate's as bad. I can't even shut down in safe mode - I get the "It is safe to shutdown screen" and that's it.

Am I screwed? And if so, how badly?

**Ferrit** · June 29th, 2005, 03:54 PM

Well need to know some more specific background. That may help
Motherboard model
number of ram sticks
is the system win98 with 2000 upgraded over the top?

**seian** · June 29th, 2005, 07:16 PM

Two ram sticks... shoot, I'm not with the machine right now to get a look at the motherboard, but it is an upgrade machine from win98 to 2000. Win98 was on the machine when I bought it, 2000 loaded on by disk, full version.

If you're wondering about the stuff I've got plugged into it: kodak multi drive (usb), wacom intuos 1 (serial, I think. Definitely not usb) and epson scanner (usb).

**peterpam** · June 30th, 2005, 10:22 AM

I would try 2 things:

1 - Disable Advance Power Management in you mobo's bios settings.
If the problem disapear, try re-enable advance power management, but try it with different settings

2 - If problem persist, reset you bios to defaul settings and the change the location of your RAM (change the slot where they are.
If the problem disapear, it means the problem were RAM timings, and you shoul take some time to optimize in the BIOPS your RAM clock settings/timings.

Hope that helped

Greetings from the country of Sun

**confus-ed** · June 30th, 2005, 06:22 PM

Originally Posted by seian

... Win98 was on the machine when I bought it, 2000 loaded on by disk, full version..

Latest bios ? Windows updates may have changed something that now shows up as a problem, as there's differences between the acpi treatment in both operating systems (acpi if on also controls APM), & a bios designed for 98 may cause issues with 2000.

**slgrieb** · July 1st, 2005, 06:35 PM

Well, let's not lose track of some basics here. A too hot CPU can cause all kinds of weird symptoms, including shutdown issues and garbled video, etc.

Does your MOBO report CPU temperature, support auto shutdown, etc? If so, go to the BIOS setup and see what kind of CPU fan speeds, and system temperatures you have. Try touching the heatsink (very carefully because it may be very hot no matter what your BIOS reports) If everything seems normal, I would look at spyware/virus issues. But I think you may need new heatsink/fan or at least new thermal compound. A thorough cleaning of the CPU die and heatsink followed by the application of a quality thermal compound like ArticSilver can work wonders, but I still think your CPU fan is the likely culprit

**deepblu** · July 4th, 2005, 10:03 PM

Is this machine networked?

**bind** · July 5th, 2005, 12:00 AM

Have you defragged your drive lately? If you haven't, it might be worth a try. You might want to also do a disk cleanup before running defrag.

**Shep926** · July 5th, 2005, 05:59 AM

I've been seeing allot of instances lately of computers not booting with USB devises attached (most notably hard drives)
Any one else running across this?

Shep