 There it is. I have a problem. I just updated the BIOS on my workstation and ever since I did, it's been randomly shutting off just while I'm not doing anything. And while normally that's the sort of thing that I would troubleshoot myself, I have another problem. And that is that if I don't leave to start my vacation in the next three minutes, my wife is going to absolutely murder me. So we're going to call in the cavalry here. Dialing A for Anthony. Hey, Anthony. Hello. Can you fix something for me? Maybe. Okay, cool. My computer's turning off and I got to go. Man, I just got back from vacation and I'm already doing tech support. Well, hey, why not come along for the ride and I'll show you my method for troubleshooting barely any information to go off of right after this information from a sponsor. Thanks to Hulkman for sponsoring this video. Hulkman's Alpha 85s helps you instantly jump start your dead car battery with no aid required, even in up to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Learn more at LMG.GG slash Hulkman. Linus tells me that he updated the bios in order to upgrade to Windows 11 and the computer's been shutting off randomly ever since. It doesn't matter what he's doing, even absolutely nothing. Let's see if we can track down the issue. Now, the first rule of thumb when doing any kind of troubleshooting, always check the most basic solutions first. So we'll start with the wall power and actually he's got a UPS down here and I don't think anything else has been turning off randomly. Like the TV still got power from what he told me. So that's probably not going to be our problem. That leaves us to the cables, which, well, I'm going to have a hard time getting in under there and you're not going to be able to see that either because not only is it kind of dark, but the TV is also covering it all up. But it looks like the eight pin 12 volt connector looks like it's okay. Actually there's multiple there and they both look like they're down all the way. And the 24 pin ATX connector is also pretty solid there. So I don't think that's our problem either. Now the system has a thread ripper CPU and sometimes over-torquing the retention mechanism can flatten out the socket's pins so that the CPU is not making contact, which can make for a no power on. But that doesn't match the description of the issue where it's happening even when the system is idle. And besides, I don't think I'm going to be able to open this thing up without some help. And I'd really rather not do that. For now we'll fire it up and move on. Maybe we'll get lucky. First we'll open up a system monitoring tool like HW info and see what our temperatures and voltages look like. And we'll also load up task manager to see if any processes are running wild and check to make sure that there's nothing weird showing up in the startup items. CPU usage looks okay to me right now. We're at 3% with only a few things actually being used right now. We've got OBS running and I guess Linus is doing some idle mining, which is fine as long as you are not specifically using your GPU for that. As for the temperatures, they look okay. They're a little high, but at the same time we've got a GPU doing idle mining on a closed loop like this. It's not really a closed loop, but like it's sharing the cooling between the CPU and GPU and the CPU is currently idling around in the forties, fifties or sixties, depending on what's happening. Normally depending on the CPU, the enclosure and the cooling you have on your system, it'll usually hover around 30 or 40, somewhere in there. As it is right now, I'm not concerned about the thermals at all. It seems perfectly fine to me. Yeah, that's not even all that hot. The hotspot temperatures in the sixties. So this cooling setup is definitely enough. We'll have to find something else that might be the cause of the problem. We'll keep these tools open for now so we can keep monitoring it as we use the computer. That way if anything does happen, we can kind of be tipped off about it before it inevitably shuts down. Before we move on, we should look at the voltages. Now something to bear in mind about software reported CPU voltages is that they're not always correct. They can change more quickly than the update on screen. So take them with some salt. It's also worth remembering that CPU core voltage will go higher or lower depending on the core clocks and what the CPU is doing. Thanks to load light calibration, a feature that tries to keep the CPU from under or overshooting its voltage range and crashing or potentially taking damage over time. This throws a lot of people for a loop because even if you set the voltage manually in the BIOS, it's not guaranteed you're going to get that voltage under any circumstances. Now this is an overclocked Threadripper 3000, so I can't really expect any specific voltage range, but I think usually if it's in a low power state, you can go from 0.6 all the way up to around 1.4 or more volts depending on the load. And while nothing stands out to me right now, this is one of the potential culprits for a random blue screen or power off, so it's worth keeping an eye on. Next, it's time to see what Windows recorded last time the PC unexpectedly powered off using Event Viewer. This is built into Windows. Just right click on the Startup button and go up to Event Viewer here, or you can access it by typing this on the command prompt if you're ever really stuck. This particular version of Event Viewer has been around since Windows 2000 and is basically unchanged even in Windows 11. We'll head over to Windows Logs and then System. Now by default, this is sorted by date and time, so we'll scroll down to the last time we know what happened and see what Windows sees. Now I actually already see some things here, so that's interesting, but you can actually tell when Windows was shut down, big gap in time, followed by three event log items when the service restarted. And if there was a blue screen, you'll see some bug check items labeled as critical as well. You can use these items to see the blue screen's error code, which you can then use to narrow things down via Google. This PC isn't blue screening, so we don't have any bug checks. We'll have to see what else is happening at the time we're down. And it looks like we have a bunch of ACPI events here. These are related to power management, and that's interesting. Remember what I said about voltages earlier? We might have just found some evidence for it. And by the way, you'll notice that there are a lot of items in the event log, just in general. So how do I know that what I'm looking at is what I'm supposed to look at? Well, informational stuff like these things here are usually not that useful unless you're trying to track down something very specific. And if you've been fixing Windows PCs for long enough, you'll know that some of these distributed COM things are usually just there on a fresh install, and they're entirely benign. If you do want to know what exactly these are referring to, though, you can copy the string of letters and numbers and search it online, or if you're feeling adventurous, in the registry. This particular one is for immersive shell. Not exactly exciting or relevant to what we're doing, but knowing how to do this can be useful for tracking down misbehaving drivers and services. And just knowing about it will help you if a scammer ever tries to convince you Windows is broken by showing you these errors. It's a pretty common trap. Coming back to our main issue, we've got a candidate for the problem, but we should also check the application log to see if anything weird is going on there. This is where things like app crashes go. And while these don't usually coincide with Windows issues, if something specific keeps happening at the same time as a recurring problem, it could be related. Now, it doesn't look like there's any patterns showing up here, so we can rule this out for now. The security logs aren't usually relevant on single user PCs, but they can show you when you've logged in, when you've used stored credentials, and so on. Useful if you suspect you've been hacked, or if there's a problem with Windows logon, but it's not what we're after. Setup, on the other hand, are related to Windows updates, and a failed or broken Windows update can sometimes do what we're seeing, albeit usually with a reboot instead of a shutdown. As expected, most of this is unremarkable information about which updates have been installed when, but a broken update or Windows update service will show errors here. For now, our best lead is the power management situation. By default, modern CPUs will enter a low-power state when they're not in use, called C states. Not to be confused with S states like sleep or hibernation, these are like the performance-oriented P states you might already be familiar with in the form of turbo boost, where the CPU will ramp up its performance in response to load. C states are just in the opposite direction. Then depending on the state, the system might turn off some parts of the CPU or park inactive cores to significantly reduce power consumption, and the voltage supplied to the cores, and therefore the CPU. You can see where I'm going with this, right? But this is a desktop PC, so idle power consumption isn't a major concern. Therefore, let's try turning off C states. To do that, we'll restart into the BIOS. And to do that, first I need to stop all of these logging programs and restart the system. Oh, I probably shouldn't have done that while Linus was still like doing stuff, but oh well. This is how you get into the BIOS usually. Sometimes you can get into it with F2, and you can get into it through Windows as well if you hold shift while clicking on restart, then using the advanced options function to select UEFI firmware settings. But we didn't do that, and so I have to match delete. From here, we're going to look for C states. Now, some BIOSes, like ASUSes, let you use the search function, which we will use. But sometimes you'll find it in like CPU configuration under advanced, or sometimes you'll find it in like power management configuration. For now, we'll just hit F9 to do search and do C state. And it is enabled. Sometimes you'll see two of them, one for global C state control and one for C1E, or enhanced halt. If we had that here, we would disable it as well. For now, let's go ahead and disable C states. Hit, oh, F10 doesn't work from here. Okay, so F10 to save and reset. That's pretty normal. And okay, if F10 doesn't work on your BIOS for save and reset, you can just go to the exit screen and it'll ask you if you want to save, usually. Now that we've rebooted, how can we know that this worked? We can't. We can't really test for a random power off event, so we'll just need to wait. I'll let it go for a few days and then we'll come back to it. Now, thankfully, I've got my water bottle from lttstore.com to keep my drink cold till then. I'll just add a little bit of ice every now and then. All right, let's take a look. It's still powered on. That's a good sign. Let's see the event log. Pixel Refresher, I do not care about you. I want to see Windows. I don't see any of those ACPI events. That's a good sign. That's really good. I think we're good. I think we're good. This was happening multiple times per day before and it's been a few days now and it's still chugging along. I think it's safe to call this one fixed. As for why the problem started happening in the first place, well, power management has always been and always will be a little bit of black magic. A little tweak to how power management works in a BIOS update, silicon degradation, or even just the silicon lottery can affect how stable power management features will be for a given system. Speaking of which, get subscribed because we finally have our last guide you'll ever need for how to build a PC coming up. And if you liked this video, you'll love that one. It's the longest video we've ever done except for the Yule log. Back to power management though. It's usually fine for laptops because of how tightly integrated the CPU and the logic board are, but not so much for desktops with modular components and longer traces. Many power management features are in fact disabled by default on a desktop, particularly anything to do with PCI express. In my experience, it's almost never a good idea to enable these on a desktop unless you're doing it specifically to see if it does work for your hardware. C states are usually okay, but there's a reason you'll see many threads about them on forums going back many, many years. In this case, whatever it was, it seems like it was just done luck, but it's fixed now. And hopefully you'll come away from this video, not only knowing that C states can be flaky, but also a little more about how to dig in and find out what a problem might actually be. And Linus will come back from vacation and I'll still have a job. And hey, you'll also know a little bit more about our sponsor Pulseway. Thanks to Pulseway for sponsoring today's video. Pulseway lets you centrally manage all your desktops, servers, network devices, and cloud infrastructure in one place. You'll be the first person to know when a user has a issue or when there's a problem with your IT environment. You'll have out of the box commands to take action such as killing processes, resetting user passwords, running PowerShell commands, backing up files, and even remote control. With powerful auto remediation tools, Pulseway can automatically resolve critical IT failures like low disk space, high CPU, and even restart your services. The patching engine will prevent vulnerabilities by checking for updates for both your operating system and third party applications and run those updates for you on a schedule that you define. And the best part is that you can do all of that from the mobile app or from the desktop. Try it for free today at Pulseway.com or through our link below. Thanks for watching guys. This one's a bit different, so why not check out Linus's new rack? It's also a bit different and a whole lot of fun.