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A friend of mine came bringing her CPU in our house to be checked for some kind of annoying behavior. Fisrt, she said the computer suddenly shut off while enjoying her Facebook. Even playing an offline games for an hour, it turns off.. Second, even without doing any task, the computer would suddenly turn off after 30 minutes or even an hour.

The situation is not the same, as it may occur even in a short period of time like 5-15 minutes which is I think due to the hot climate or something. But its not!

It took me 6 hours troubleshooting her CPU, an EMAXX MCP61P AVL motherboard. I tried to format and install OS using another hard disk drive to check if this is one of the problems. It turns off while in the middle of installation - upon loading cabinet files. Then, Ive switched the memory to different slot to see whether its good or bad.

Check the temperature

For me, touching the heat sink safely would help me feel and know how the temperature goes within the CPU. Its overheating when the heat you felt at the tip of your finger is too hot and dare not to touch it. However, not all situations are accurate.

This could be a challenge if you dont have spare parts similar to that one supported by the motherboard - like the processor and a RAM attached to it. But thanks because I have a processor which is supported by the kind of motherboard she have. So, I took the chance to learn on this one by checking first the softwares installed which uses a lot of memory usage, for viruses which may cause the system to shutdown, the operating systems behavior as well, the hard disk and above all the processor and memory. 

Check the Thermal Paste

Hmm... why not check the thermal paste (often than not it may happen once). Let us remember that every thing attached to the board is considered essential and should not be underestimated . Then, I tried to check the thermal paste between the heatsink and the processor (where Ive seen has dried up and need to be replaced), but what I did was just wipe it out and placed it again without thermal paste.

Yeah! Even without thermal paste, the CPU will run but its really necessary to put thermal paste in-between to absorb heat effectively. However, the problem persists. Tired enough, no choice but to test the last option I had in mind - to use another processor instead.

How happy I was to see it did work. Indeed, the processor was the real problem. It runs smoothly in 3 hours without abruptly shutting down while doing defragmentation, virus scanning using Microsoft Essentials at the same time. I can now enjoy Facebook or play games without interruptions. Problem solved!