XP shuts down laptop suddenly

[Gradient]

My laptop was running horrendously slow, so I felt it was time I reinstalled XP. The reinstall went fine, but after adding the usual virus scan, Photoshop, wireless software etc. it suddenly froze and turned off. Every time I restart, it runs fine for about two minutes then freezes and turns off again.

I used my recovery disc to open the recovery console and ran chkdsk, which identified a fault, but doesn't seem to have fixed it or gave me the option of fixing it. I've never used the recovery console before, so I don't really know what to do with it besides that. It could be a problem with XP or a piece of software, but I can't run System Restore fast enough before it shuts off. Any advice on what to do next?

Thanks,
Phil

 

[gavinseabrook]

Boot the laptop into XP, from there, open your my computer and right click your hard drive. Select Properties. Then under the tools tab, you have your error checking (chkdsk). Tell it to automatically fix errors, and it will ask you to reboot. Do so and let the disk check run. Then test and post your findings here. (You might also want to check the event viewer in Start>control panel>administrative tools>event viewer under the system area. Check for any "System Errors" or "Bug checks")

 

[Gradient]

Thanks for the help. Check disk ran, informed me that it had finished and carried on loading XP, which lasted a few minutes before switching off again. Check disk didn't tell me anything else, or if it did it vanished too quick for me to read the rest of the message. Under Event Viewer there were a few problems, but it kept turning off too fast to detail them properly; the one I managed to write down was a critical failure in the IPSec Service, event id. 615.

I should add that since my first post, XP has been repaired, and a while after had another clean install (possibly against my better judgement, but I really needed to get it working). Neither has done anything to alleviate the problem.

 

[Ramesh v]

Repair XP

Start recovery console.Run the command chkdsk /r.It should run for some 20 mts.After that try to repair XP .

 

[Gradient]

Check disk said it found and fixed one or more errors, but XP still shut down. Repairing Windows didn't help, and when I ran check disk again, it still said it had found and fixed one or more errors, presumably meaning it didn't fix anything in the first place or the errors popped back up again.