Weird power failures on laptop

[Grand Maester]

In the past couple of days I have experienced two instances where my laptop just shut off. It was like I had removed the battery while it was on and not plugged in or like when you force a shutdown by holding the power button. No warning, whatsoever, no error, no nothing -- and BOTH times it was plugged into the wall!

The first time it did this I simply hit the power button and it rebooted just fine. But earlier today it happened again and I had to force reboot it several times because it would start without any errors, I'd enter my password, and it would load my autoloads, but as soon as I tried to open something it would freeze. This happened five or six times. After numerous attempts I finally got it to reboot and function property but I can't figure out what the deal was.

The only thing I can think of is I recently upgraded the RAM (with much helpful advice from fellow neowinians as to what type and the specs I should look for), but that was more than a week ago and if this is the new chip it would be the first problem I've had with it. The machine had been simply purring along at a much faster clip (I added a 1 gb chip to the 512mb chip I already had). In addition I reseated both RAM chips (not just the new one) in between a couple of the reboots and it had no effect.

Any Ideas?

[The2]

Overheating. Install some software to monitor temperature and start some intensive application (for example, Everest burn in test)

And it's no coincidence that it happened when it was plugged in to the wall - because it generates more heat than on battery

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

be sure to clear out the dust in the filters on the side of your laptop. take some canned air.

[Grand Maester]

Was this the auto cut-off to prevent overheating?

[Grand Maester]

Does this mean that it had nothing to do my installing a new RAM chip?

[Grand Maester]

Overheating. Install some software to monitor temperature and start some intensive application (for example, Everest burn in test)

And it's no coincidence that it happened when it was plugged in to the wall - because it generates more heat than on battery

My computer only has one sensor, on the hard drive in addition I have a rather obscure make which would make it hard to find comparison data. So monitoring temperature would be difficult at best.

Just to repeat my other questions:

Are you implying that this was the auto-cutoff on the motherboard that prevents overheating?

Does this mean that the new RAM chip isn't involved? Because I do find that a little coincidental since this has never happened before.

[Olemus]

Why not try changing the ram chip or taking it out (if you have multiple in the machine) and finding out? Hardware problems are almost always trial and error and for the most part you have to troubleshoot them yourself