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I have a laptop that is behaving strangely. When I turn it on, it does everything what it is supposed to do, but after a minute or so I hear a Click and all goes black. It's like it turns off the power. It doesn't matter what the laptop is doing. It also happens when it's just waiting in the Bios setup menu.

Has someone experienced this before? Can it be the power supply? Can it be a cooling problem? Any ideas?

By the way, it's a Compaq Presario Laptop, maybe 3 years old already.

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    The click could be your hard drive snapping to rest position when power is lost, that part sounds somewhat normal. As to the actual power loss, I'm not sure but it could be overheating - can you check your CPU temperatures from the BIOS? Does it last a shorter time if you turn it back on immediately as opposed to waiting 15 minutes?
    – Bob
    Commented Mar 20, 2012 at 9:31
  • I never thought of the click being the harddrive. It takes longer if it's off for a while, that's why I thought of a cooling problem. I'll check if I can see the CPU temprature. Good tip.
    – ZEDA-NL
    Commented Mar 20, 2012 at 16:20
  • The symptoms gone worse. Now when turning the power on, only the power led will come on, but goes black in about halve a second. It's basically same as when I have unplugged the power and the battery is completely exhaused. I'm pretty sure it won't get too hot in 0.5 seconds. I guess it's a power problem after all (?).
    – ZEDA-NL
    Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 8:57

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My first thought would be a soldering connection that's faulty. It will be find while the machine is cold, but as soon as the connection warms up above a certain level the connection is broken. It should be easily repairable by an authorised repair centre

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It's possible that a 3 year old laptop could have accumulated a lot of dust over the years. I would give the vents a gentle vacuum then leave the laptop on in a well ventilated and air conditioned room while having a temperature monitoring program running like http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html.

This should eliminate all possibilities of it being temperature related.

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