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3 Posts
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2010
M4600 shutting down
I have a M4600 laptop that is shutting down randomly. I've installed SpeedFan to monitor the temperatures, it's running warm but I do not believe a temp shut down. I fairly convinced that it needs a new mother board but I'm not an expert.
I see on ebay, the computer is worth about $200 and really what I would like to do is swap my 500Gb SSD into another laptop and continue to work. Setting up a new laptop to where I have this hard drive at now would take a lot of hours and I'd like to avoid it.
It's an old computer but it has a brand new battery and hard drive from me trying to solve this random shut down.
I hate to throw good money after bad but otherwise this old box rocks for what I do in Solidworks and I dont have the money to update.
If I specify M4600 i7 2760QM 2.4GHz with a used M4600 will they be compatible 100% or would I be better off getting a NOS motherboard?
Thanks
Walms
3 Posts
1
October 29th, 2019 07:00
Ok folks, I found the issue after months of searching the web... it seems like a fairly common problem with these computers back in 2012 but no resolutions from what I could find.
so the workaround is to shut off wifi and that eliminates the random shut downs... the problem is surviving now without wifi!
who has had the same problems and has Dell come up with a solution?
tia
Dell-Alan D
3 Apprentice
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1.2K Posts
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October 31st, 2019 05:00
@Walms if the system is shutting down from the wireless card that would suggest that it's either the wireless card itself or the slot on the motherboard that is causing this.
a) Is the system shutting down to off when this happens or is it restarting?
b) When you disabled the wireless card, did you disable it in the BIOS or in Windows?
c) Have you recently update the BIOS on the system?
d) How long has this been happening for?
Please be aware that due to the age of the system, parts availability may be tricky with the mobo or wireless card being very old stock.
Alan
Walms
3 Posts
0
October 31st, 2019 06:00
Hi Allen, thank you for the reply.
A, The system shuts down to off.
B, I disabled the wifi in windows.
C, No not recently.
D, I bought the computer just off lease back in 2015 and at that time it would happen monthly. This continued at this rate for a couple years. The shutdowns eventually increased from monthly down to weekly then daily. In the end the shutdowns caused the original harddrive to lock in park so I upgraded to a solid state drive. At the same time I reverted from the loaded win 10 back to win 7. The result was no difference. Still shitting down daily.
its an old machine but still works great on Solidworks so this is my motivation to save her.
Dell-Alan D
3 Apprentice
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1.2K Posts
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November 1st, 2019 04:00
@Walms as the system is shutting down to off, that pretty much confirms that it is hardware related.
Is this the thread you found with other users encountering this - https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-Only/M4600-random-power-down/td-p/3709038/page/2
My first suggestion would be to try disabling the wireless card in the BIOS and then running the system for a short period of time and monitoring it.
Power on the system and keep tapping the F2 key in rapid succession to access the BIOS. Navigate down to the "Wireless" section.
You should have two options here "Wireless Switch" and "Wireless Devices"
Under Wireless Devices untick the boxes for all 3 options.
Save the changes and exit.
I'll drop you a private message to get your tag details so I can check what wireless card you have
Alan
Zeerro
1 Message
0
November 27th, 2020 09:00
I have three Dell Precision M4600 laptops, all experiencing the same random shutdown problem. Here is the solution that worked on all three... Go into the bios settings to Power Management/ExpressCharge. Change the setting to Standard Charge... Bingo! No more random shutdown.