Satellite L355 shuts down while playing WoW

I bought my Toshiba Satellite L355-S7915 in July, 2009, and it has served me well. However, the last couple of months it has taken to shutting down without warning from time to time. My first theory was that perhaps the AC power adapter/charger had, unknown to me, failed and that the system had been running for some time on battery power, which had then run out, shutting down the system. This proved not to be the case, since when I got the system up again, the batteries were always 100% charged every time.

My next theory was that perhaps the AC power adapter/charger was overheating and some type of breaker had been tripped, because not only did the laptop go completely dead, but all lights, including the AC power light *and* the battery light, go dark. If you try to turn the machine back on by pressing the PowerOn button, nothing happens. Initially, I tried to get the system to wake up by unplugging and re-plugging the various pieces of the AC power adapter/charger, which did not help. I then noticed that whether I was frantic with activity or did nothing at all, after 2-3 minutes, the 3 green LEDs on the front of the system came back on on their own, and I could then press the PowerOn button and the system would reboot and come back up.

Then it dawned on me that this only happened when I was playing World of Warcraft. My theory now is that the system overheats after playing WoW for some period of time (I haven't attempted to measure this yet, but it longer than 2 hours for sure), and then some type of internal temperature sensor shuts the system down. After 2-3 minutes pass and the temperature drops, the sensor allows the system to come back online and be bootable.

I guess the reason for this post is two-fold: first, to determine if my hypothesis is correct (and if not, what *is* the problem), and second, to determine how I can stop my system from overheating and shutting down, or at least I would like a warning before everything goes black.

I am running Windows Vista Home Basic. The system is sitting on a hardwood desktop.

Thanks in advance for any help!!!

 

Hello and welcome to NBR!

For your case, I would say it is overheating. First thing I would do is to open it up, clean it up and reapply the thermal paste.
If this is too advanced for you, you can simply try a cooler.

But before this I want you to:

download;
CPUID - System & hardware benchmark, monitoring, reporting

Then download;
Torture test your CPU with Prime95

And run the torture test, I would in same moment keep eye on the tempratures, if it is anything above 90C you need a cleanup, thats for sure.

Let me know the results, and I would be happy to help you out.