I was looking for a new laptop. In the end I went for the 56122WLMi from Tesco. It arrived this morning, booted up fine and all looked well. It went through installing all of the Acer stuff and then popped up saying I needed to register Norton. It started downloading updates for it, but at the same time started downloading Windows updates.

Then all of a sudden, it just switched off, and has been doing it since It boots up ok, loads all the gadgets and the taskbar and then just turns off. I went into Safe Mode and disabled all the Norton in Services and Startup and it seems to stay on a bit longer now, but still intermittingly turning off.

I've tried it with just mains & battery, just battery and just mains. It also has never switched itself off in Safe Mode so I'm assuming this is a software fault? I tried going to go into safe mode and have a go at completely uninstalling Norton but it tells me I need to restart in normal mode to do that. When I do that, it switches of....

All the event viewer tells me is "The previous system shutdown was unexpected" with event ID 6008.

Anyone any other ideas? Should I just return this? That would be my choice, but if it's something I can fix then I'd like to, as my girlfriend has several deadlines for college and at the minute is without a computer and will probably be close to tears if I tell her this needs sent back!

P.S. This is running Windows Vista

Try booting into safe mode by pressing F8 repeatedly on startup and choosing the safe mode command line. When it boots into that, type in appwiz.cpl, and press enter. That should bring up the add/remove programs thing. Try uninstalling it from there. I think it's still safe mode though, so I don't know if it will work.

Try reading this thread. See if that helps.

Regards

One of the anoying things about windows XP is that it reboots instead of giving you BSODs unless you uncheck that option, which can make problems dificult to diganose. I can tell you that this is definately a software error and if all else fails use the acer restore discs. To allow the system to give a BSOD and error codes go to control panel>system>advanced tab>startup and recovery> uncheek the automatically restart tab under system failure.

But he;s running windows vista...

btw, just a little infos, newer acer notebooks are famous of its overheat shutdown. (especially with ATIMRX1600HM)

there's your issue. Windows vista has many incompatibilities. It was rushed to the market and there are many drivers/ equipment it does not support.

If I were you, I would install XP.

that makes me think a software problem even more. Vista shares the auto shutdown feature with XP and has many incompatibilities as Tedster said. Also acer improved the cooling system in the 5XXXX series with a copper heatpipe cooler that does a much better job than the aluminum heatsinks used in the 1XXXX and 3XXXX series. Although the biggest problem with any laptop is that people oftain block the bottom cooling vents.