Windows 8 shutting down.
 

Suddenly, (ie as of today), my unattended laptop (W8) is shutting down.
It has never done this before - if left on battery it would enter 'sleep' but touching the touchpad - or sometimes the power button - it would come alive again, but now it is shutting down (not whilst I am using it) and has to start all over from scratch.
I have checked the 'power saver' settings and nothing seems to have altered - 'turn off display after 5 and 10 minutes' and 'sleep after 10 and 15 minutes' - but I thought that sleep was a transient state rather than power off and then reboot.

Reply to G-CPTN
 

This could be an overheating problem. How old is the Lap top and has it had a spring clean ? At this stage its best to look at the obvious rather than a component/Windows 8 problem especially if its been working without problems for the last few years.

There are lots of sites that give access to advice in situations like this and you may even be able to find advice relating to your particular Lap Top.

CAT III

Thanks - a logical explanation.

If it were overheating, it's more likely to conk out while using it, as that's when the power demand is greatest, rather than when it's idle.

Going to sleep still requires enough power to maintain the contents of RAM, so if your battery is getting a bit tired, it may not have enough power to maintain sleep state.

Have you recently installed any MS updates? Ever since Meltdown and Spectre, MS patches have been pretty buggy, so that's another suspect area.

SD