Why does my computer shut down after an hour or two of playing music from my external drive?

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Hi Leo:

If the problem is indeed eating up too many cpu cycles, your reader might want to try Process Tamer:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html

It is completely free and works quite well.

Cheers!

...ask the Bloke.

If he is playing in a club environment another culprit may be low frequency vibration. i.e. bass. I have a laptop integrated into my car, and have seen it freeze several times during specific RPM ranges. I believe the engine vibration hits a particular resonance that the hard drive cylinder heads do not like.

also remeber that any USB connection especially USB 1.0 has a power limitation that could cause a shut down check that you haven't excedded this OR better yet use a powered USB hub !!

Actually, trying different brands has more merit than you might think. Unfortunately, both of mine are no-name generics, but one of my USB external enclosures draws a lot more power than the other one (I have to disconnect everything else from the hub).

Also, see if SpeedFan works for your laptop (for some reason, it doesn't like many laptops) -- then you can see what the temps and voltages are doing (including a nice graph so you can see trends).

A longshot that you could also try is to use one of the Ramdisk or Disk-caching programs and copy the set off the external drive into a temporary space.

But if you're complaining that the internal drive "only" has 40 GB, then a 1G ramdrive will be very tiny indeed.

everynight my comp shuts off at 12:15 am. it takes about 20-30 min before i can turn it back on without it shuting off again. however, there are some nights that it doesnt shut off and it is completly random.

i on the computer and watch some mtv download... then my computer shut down instantly... without anything popping out?
isit my harddisk problem?

My Computer Frequently shuts off without warning, its used for a gaming computer and we also use AOL, and AIM, and the games we play are pretty old, ive played and the computer just shuts off at random in the middle of gaming, Instant Messages, Google searches, and even when i tried to restart the computer it shut off before completion. what do i do?

What is a safe operating temperature of a cpu desktop. Is 59 *c too high. My computer does shut down quite often and heats up rather quickly to this temperature. It will shut often just by browsing on the internet or recalling files from my external drive. My cpu fan is working but the heatsink seems quite hot. The computer will stay on all night without shutting down or restarting but it will shut itself off in the morning once I try to use it.
I have an external hub to power my external drive that plugs in to the back of the computer. Settings maximum operation temp of 60*c before it shuts down, should it be higher?

Hello, I also have a proble with this desktop shutting down, Pc could be up and running all week or a few hours and only while I am online in a browser looking at something pc will shut down and screen goes black and retarts and performs a disk check for errors, then I go back online and it may be 10 mins or hours later and when it feels like it the Unit just shuts down, I have removed a lot of files and pictures on to cd's and then I hoped I removed them from unit, What is my Problem..........Thanks Richard

My Acer laptop began starting to shut itself off, out of the blue, while I listen to Radio streaming for a few hours. Please tell me what is wrong? It never did that in the past while it was still new. I have Vista.

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