Can BIOS failure shut down computer?

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@mjschumacher wrote:

My Latitude CPi occasionally shuts down abruptly; power turns itself off.

- If it happens during normal operations (in Windows98), rebooting usually restores the situation without any further problems appearing.

- If it happens during bootup (before Windows takes over), it can take repeated tries and keystrokes (CTRL, CTRL-ALT-DEL, power on/off) to make the reboot go past the failure point. I am not sure I have found a repeatable sequence yet.

Questions:

- Does this sound like a BIOS problem?

- If so, is there a more repeatable procedure to reset it?

Notes of potentially related issues:

- The computer's battery is dead, so I suspected power fluctuations at first, but the computer is on a surge-protected line.

- For a while, the computer has not been working properly in undocked mode. It only comes up in safe mode; in normal mode, the above problem occurs every time late in the boot sequence. Given the error messages, it seems to be a problem with the driver of the (built-in) display.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions that will make this old trusted machine last a little longer.

-- Marco

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I am having a similar problem right now. Every time I turn on my Latitude D600 laptop, it starts to load the bios and then shuts down. The laptop worked perfectly well yeseterday when I used it. The only change I've made to the computer is that I loaded on software to enable the laptop to access Verizon DSL. The laptop is now useless. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.