How to properly shut down my PC

I think I might be facing a bit of a larger issue here... My PC seems to be shutting itself down completely out of nowhere. Sometimes it happens after just a single minute, and other times I’ll get a solid hour of work in before it cuts out on me. Does anyone have any idea what could be triggering this, and more importantly, how can I go about pinpointing the exact cause so I'm not just guessing?

It could be anything—we're talking everything from the power supply and RAM to your hard drive, or maybe just a buildup of dust... To start off, when was the last time you actually gave your PC a good cleaning?

Go ahead and grab HWMonitor. Once you've got it installed, snap a screenshot for us so we can check if those temperatures are looking a bit too high..

I make it a point to give it a thorough cleaning pretty regularly—usually about every two weeks or so—to make sure everything stays running smoothly. I actually just finished a deep clean on it, and I've attached a link to a screenshot here so you can see the current status for yourself: http://prntscr.com/4wilnq

Hmm, those CPU temps aren't looking great... If they're hitting those levels while you're just idling in IDLU, I can only imagine what happens once you actually put the processor under a real load. Are you sure you haven't skipped over repasting the chip when you last cleaned out the tower? Honestly, if it’s been a long while since you last touched the thermal paste, here's what I'd suggest: pop the case open, pull the heatsink off the CPU, and use some isopropyl alcohol to wipe away all that old, crusty stuff from both the cooler and the processor itself. Then, just put a tiny amount—about the size of a grain of rice—right in the center of the CPU, snap the heatsink back on, and see how the temperatures settle down. For a more detailed walkthrough, check out this video: 👍

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-wBqii4xXw

I haven't swapped out the pasta for quite some time now 😁.. I'll have to head out and pick some up tomorrow, though I'm honestly not sure if my local grocery store keeps it in stock or if they'd need to special order it. I'll give it a shot tomorrow and let you all know how it goes..

Thanks

If you're seeing idle temps hitting 70 degrees, you've got a serious problem on your hands, because as soon as you try to run anything even slightly more demanding than just browsing the web, the whole system is probably going to crash.

It looks like his sensors are totally out of whack; the readout at the top is showing a cool 48°, while down below it's screaming 70° plus!

I'm not entirely sure if anyone else has brought this up yet—it might just be me thinking aloud here—but there's a chance his graphics card is simply overheating.

I had this whole issue where my graphics card—which I picked up used, so it was already pretty beat up—was overheating like crazy, causing my entire system to crash at totally random intervals...