There are few things more frustrating than when your computer shuts down by itself. When your computer powers down unexpectedly it can erase changes that you’ve made to documents and applications that you haven’t saved yet, causing you to lose hours (if not days) of work. Even if you regularly save your work, an undependable computer can cause enormous headaches and amounts of frustration.
Here are the main reasons your computer shuts down slowly or by itself and some popular solutions.
Contents
Why Your Computer Turns Itself Off
There are two main reasons why your computer will turn itself off that account for 9 out of 10 crashes.
- Powering down can be a fail-safe to prevent permanent hardware damage when your computer starts to overheat. While it’s annoying in the moment, ultimately it’s a good thing when your computer shuts down by itself to prevent overheating. If your computer didn’t regulate its temperature this way than its hardware could dangerously overheat, leaving it unusable and rendering its stored files lost forever.
- You computer might power down because of a problem with its memory. Your computer requires a certain amount of free memory to complete its tasks, and if it suddenly and unexpectedly runs out of memory it can crash and turn itself off.
How to Prevent Overheating and Memory Crashes
Once you identify why you’re computer shuts down by itself, you can identify the right solution to prevent it from happening.
- Computers often overheat when you run multiple resource-intensive programs at once. The more programs you have running, the more work your computer has to do. And the more work your computer has to do, the hotter its components are going to get trying to keep up with your demands. If you suspect that your computer is overheating, try running fewer programs at once and see if that keeps your system from shutting down so much.
- There are two main ways to fix memory-based crashes; you either have to purchase more memory, or replace a poorly operating stick of RAM.
- Upgrading to more memory will give your computer more free computational resources, allowing it to perform its tasks faster and easier.
- If you suspect that the problem is a faulty memory stick, then simply take turns removing the memory you do have and isolate whether a single stick was causing all the problems. If you are able to isolate a single stick, then replacing it should cure your crashes.
Registry Cleaners: A Great Cure All
One of the best things you can do to ensure that this problem doesn’t repeat itself is to get yourself a good registry cleaner. Corrupted files and extra entities in your registry can cause a host of problems, and can directly cause either overheating or problems with your memory.
By getting a good registry cleaner and running it once a week, you’ll be able to clear out all those dead-ends and dangerous files that damage your performance and directly or indirectly cause your computer to shut down on its own. Think of it as a quick, once-a-week tune-up that will keep your computer running smoothly