Laptop suddenly turned off

hello fellas so i was using my laptop as normal (web browsing and some pdf reading) when it suddenly powered off by itself without warning. as if i pressed the power button. i initially suspected this was due to my poor battery health (sometimes, though rarely, the battery percentage drops from like 30% to like 10% and the system goes to sleep/hibernate by itself. last time that happened i was on ubuntu, maybe 2-3 months ago) but when i turned the laptop on again and plugged it in, the battery was at a normal level (35-ish%), so this couldn’t have been that. also it’s not like my laptop was too hot or that the ram was too full.

could this be a hardware failure of some sort? how can i check what happened? i tried to check journalctl -xe and ksystemlog but i cant find anything useful.

if it helps im running the latest vanilla kernel on kde plasma on wayland with intel graphics.

If this was a one-off event, I wouldn’t get too worried - all computers crash. If it happens a lot…

If your battery is going from 30->10% your battery is probably the culprit

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If your battery is doing as you say it may have something to do with your power management settings as some of these instruct the computer to turn off/hibernate etc when the battery hits a certain level.

This has me curious now. Is it an overheat protection thing? How hot is your laptop getting?

And this one’s more a question to the general community: Is overheat protection built into laptops on OS level or BIOS-level (OS-independent)? What tools are there to monitor temps?

well i suspected that too but like i said, when i turned it on again and plugged it in, the battery was around the same level before the machine powered off.

also, the computer didnt fall to sleep or hibernate, it literally turned off. image i had a desktop and someone suddenly took the plug off. if it was the battery thing it would at least reset to whatever i was doing before.

That’s what happens when your battery suddenly disconnects or runs out before low battery state is detected.

If it was a singular occurrence, assume it’s just some hardware quirk with the battery.

btw i should have probably mentioned that lately my computer freezes at random points (keyboard and touchpad stop responding, animations not playing, music repeating the last 1 sec…), despite not having an obvious problem like full ram or something. in these situations (3 times these past 2 weeks) i just force power off and restart because i havent configured the sysrq button yet. although this has happened to me some times in the past (many months ago when i was using ubuntu mate or something), ive never had the laptop actually power off by itself. maybe this is related to that?

also excuse my incoherent ramblings, english is not my first language lol

How hot is your laptop getting?

normally around 45 degrees celsius. sometimes when i do stuff like installing updates or downloading large files it might get up to 70+ for a little while before cooling off. i get that data from a thermal monitor plasmoid. to be fair it gets quite warm where i live right now. but again the laptop wasnt particularly hot when i was using it…

This could very well cause many more issues. You should never hard power off. It takes less than 20 seconds to set it up, maybe a full minute if you have to search for the thread here. If it was once because you forgot to set it up, that’s one thing. Your computer will work much better long term if you take care of it.

As far as the freezing-the next time it happens please provide your journal to see if there’s errors causing it, or if that’s also hardware related.

SSD? Nvme? HDD?

How old is the laptop? Random freezes can be caused by the build-up of dust…

I got 2 free computers that way once before, the owners were just going to throw them away

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i bought it 4 years ago

You should never hard power off

yes i agree, i’ll get to it soon…

this is the laptop. it came with n nvme ssd (KBG30ZMV256G TOSHIBA)

Internal dust is a possibility then. Can you unscrew the back panel on the laptop and have a look?

dont really want to mess with the internals rn, but ill check it out when i get the chance.