I have an Amilo D7830 which is well out of warranty.
It has worked fine for ages, but the battery hasn't been holding its charge for a while, and has recently been turning itself off.
It has now reached the point that it won't boot into Windows anymore. It just gets to the desktop, and then shuts down.
I assumed that the battery had died, but before I ordered a new one, I thought I would investigate a little.
I removed the battery, and just connected the mains supply. Still the same. (suggesting the battery is not causing the shut-downs)
I can boot into safe mode no problem. I thought that there may be an issue with a driver, so swapped the hard drive out and tried to do a factory restore.
The laptop boots from the CD and goes through the initial stages of Windows setup (loads all of its drivers) but as soon as it gets to the screen where you chose whether you want to start recovery console or install a fresh copy of Windows, the system shuts down.
I then came to the conclusion that it was overheating (but it is strange that it happens at exactly the same point each time)
I opened removed the heatsink and fan assembly and replaced the thermal transfer paste with some high performance silver stuff, still exactly the same.
I then ran some DOS-based diagnostics tools... I ran a CPU burn-in utility which should generate plenty of heat, but it completed with no errors. I did the same for memory and hard disk, none of which caused the machine to reboot.
This suggests that it isn't overheating.
DOS applications seem to run fine, it is just when I run Windows, or try to install Windows...
I have tried disabling power management in the BIOS, but it makes no difference..
I have completely run out of ideas. Can anyone offer any suggestions?
Thanks
Nick