Question Laptop shuts off during boot

[Viut]

I have an alienware laptop that shuts off during the boot process.

This happens several different ways:
1. I turn the computer on and it shows the alienware logo, it loads for a bit and shuts off. Then it turns back on and it's at the alienware logo again

2. I turn on the computer and I manage to get into windows, I'm in windows for a 3-5 minutes and the computer shuts off, turns back on at the alienware logo

3. I run system diagnostics and the process starts, it gets to the end of "testing vga fan" and I can see the text saying "testing processor" just before the computer turns off. It always turns off at this point in the test.

Every time it shuts off I can hear a click, like the one you hear when you press the power button to shut down your computer.

I have tried:

1. cleaning laptop
2. reseating ram
3. changing thermal paste
4. changing the dc cable that was a little bit burnt
5. updating bios
6. tried running a system restore once and the computer got back to a restore point with no problem, it took about half an hour but the laptop did not turn off

Does anybody have any idea what may be causing this and how to fix it?

Keep in mind this laptop had never been opened before it started malfunctioning.

Thanks
-viut

 

[Grobe]

How old is it and how much have it being used? What model name?

Have it ever being exposed to abuse, such as falling to the floor during its lifetime?

This issue - have it happends in the past and being more common as time went through, or did it just apppeared one day never happening before ?

 

[Viut]

How old is it and how much have it being used? What model name?

Have it ever being exposed to abuse, such as falling to the floor during its lifetime?

This issue - have it happends in the past and being more common as time went through, or did it just apppeared one day never happening before ?

The laptop is an alienware 17 R3, it was about 2 years old when this started happening.

It has never fallen or anything of the sort and it was only used for light gaming (league of legends, gamecube and gameboy emulators and other games that are not too graphics intensive), light streaming and 2d game development in unity.

Issue just appeared one day about a year ago and has been happening ever since. Decided I would try to find the issue again after I saw the laptop the other day and tried to turn it on.

 

[Grobe]

There is a very simple thing to do - but may not be relevant to the problem anyway - change cmos battery.

another simple thing to try is to disable whatever possible components in bios, and see if it fails to boot.

If that doesn't fix the problem, I'm afraid the underlaying cause of failure may be a bad capacitor, or a bad solder point on either cpu or gpu chip.
If you know how to solder and also have a capacitor tester - it is possible (not easy) to fix. If it is a problem with soldering point on cpu/gpu - there is a chance of making it work by "baking" the card, some have done it to GPU cards. Problem is you cannot control the flow of soldering thin underneath gpu/cpu so you have no means to spot if the process is done (have it melted at all?) or if the soldering thin on some points have bridged - aka short circuit.

 

[Viut]

There is a very simple thing to do - but may not be relevant to the problem anyway - change cmos battery.

another simple thing to try is to disable whatever possible components in bios, and see if it fails to boot.

If that doesn't fix the problem, I'm afraid the underlaying cause of failure may be a bad capacitor, or a bad solder point on either cpu or gpu chip.
If you know how to solder and also have a capacitor tester - it is possible (not easy) to fix. If it is a problem with soldering point on cpu/gpu - there is a chance of making it work by "baking" the card, some have done it to GPU cards. Problem is you cannot control the flow of soldering thin underneath gpu/cpu so you have no means to spot if the process is done (have it melted at all?) or if the soldering thin on some points have bridged - aka short circuit.

I forgot to update, turning off intel speedstep got the computer to work!

Thanks a lot!