Maximum PC

My acer aspire 7551-7422 keeps shutting down to blank screen. It started when i was playing a online game ( Madden 08 ) after that its been doing it off and on for a couple of days. I do have a usb keyboard and mouse hooked up to it. I have been hooking my 17 inch monitor to it also but have stopped thinking it might have to much hooked up to it But it does it with out monitor hooked up. I'm thinking it's over heating I have d loaded cpuid monitor to it but really dont know what range is normal for the different tempurtures it tells me it has. Can anyone give me some advice on what to do ? I can not afford to loose this computer My Desktop has already crashed I have only had this about a yr. Any help would be much appreciated.

Generally, if your laptop's CPU is running higher than 60-65 degrees Celsius (140-149 degrees Fahrenheit), you are probably experiencing overheating issues. One of the things that I personally recommend when using a laptop is using some sort of laptop "cooler" that uses one or two fans (powered via a USB port on the laptop) to provide active cooling to the underside of the laptop case. It also serves to keep some distance between the bottom of the laptop and any other surface you might have it resting on (such as your lap). This is what I use with my Toshiba laptop computer: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834998492

I see, after Googling your particular model of Acer laptop, that you have an AMD Phenom X4 Quad-Core N970 2.2 GHz processor. Knowing how Acer builds their laptops, I suspect you are suffering an overheating issue. Before you do anything else, get a can of compressed air and try removing any removable panels on the underside of the laptop and carefully blow out any dust that may have accumulated in your laptop. To monitor your laptop's CPU and hard drive temperatures in Windows, you might want to use Speedfan or BatteryCare.

I down loaded the speedfan 4.46 the highest temp is the core at 45C Temp 1 and 2 are at 39 to 40 HDO is 35C every now and then they will show a red arrow a going up a blue arrow going down or a green check mark. It shows three fans at 0 RPM. Is this good ? If I have a fan it seems its not running let me know if this what I need to be doing I really dont know what I'm looking at thanks

Speedfan uses a lot of information (if not all) from the motherboard's information in the BIOS. Your temperatures seem very normal (heck, they appear to be much cooler than I would expect from an AMD quad-core in a laptop computer) and do not seem to support the idea that your laptop might be experiencing an overheating issue. As for the information concerning fans, please understand that laptop computers do not have but maybe one or two fans at the most, and Speedfan's information concerning those things are not to be taken at face value in a laptop (read the disclaimer in the description of Speedfan's description).

Another thing to look at in Speedfan is the S.M.A.R.T. parameters of the hard drive in the laptop. This is useful information as it can give you at least some indication as to the health of the drive. I have seen at least one or two Acer laptops whose hard drives fail in just over a year of use. Whether this is heat-related or not, I really can't say--it could just be a drive that died an early death for mechanical reasons.