Problem Solved! Acer Aspire Shutting Down

After a week of searching for a solution, I found out what the problem was my parent's Acer Aspire. You would not believe where I found the answer!

My parents came back into town because of a recent death in the family and brought, of course, both laptops. For a recap of what happened before, check my past laptop experience with my parents.

The laptop my father was using was the Acer Aspire 5315. He didn't want all of the software on the computer. I found the OS disk, backed up his data, reformatted his hard drive, and voila! He had a clean machine.

The one piece of software I didn't install was the most critical piece of software he needed: The Acer ePower Management Utility.

Here's what the problem was: The Acer required the ePower Management Utility to control the fan. When the machine was used for an extended period of time, it would overheat. When the laptop overheated, the laptop would shut down to save the computer from melting down or damaging the processor. With the ePower Management Utility installed, the software would identify that the laptop was overheating and activate the fan.

Since then, we (*I*) have been benchmarking it by leaving it on, putting it into suspend/hibernate mode and everything seems to be working fine.

Now, it seems my parents are grateful because they each have a laptop.

How did I figure this out? Research. :-)

There was a whole post on this at the Ubuntu forums. It seems some other techno-geeks like me reformatted the hard drive and wanted to install Linux on the machine.

For those who own other Acer machine models, I imagine this would pertain to you as well if your laptop continues to shut down after 10-13 minutes of heating up.

Hope this helps anyone who had similar problems.