Dell laptop turns off within seconds of running it with the power lead connected

[1phil1]

Hello People, my computer keeps turning itself off whenever I attach the power adaptor.  This occurs within seconds, it only very occasionally does the same when running on the battery only.  I do not hear the fan starting up before this happens to suggest an overheating problem.  Up to now I have tried the following with no success;
-buying a new power lead
-running the laptop with the battery removed on mains power only

Is anyone able to offer any further suggestions or ideas about what might be causing this to happen?

Thank you...

[DaveLembke]

I'd verify that all fans are freely spinning.... this is a long shot since its not really related to suggestion that plugging in the cord causes it to shutdown, but if a fan doesnt report back that its  spinning the system will shut down very quickly in the same symptom. For the fact that it occasionally happens when on battery power only, its possible that on battery power the power management has it running more lightly on lesser power and fans only need to spin slower if at all, and when plugged into the wall the power management is set to 100% for performance and so it ramps the clock to the CPU to the max and expects the fans to spin up to the max if need be and if one of them falls short of spinning at 100% it will shut down.

How long has this problem been happening?

[1phil1]

Thank you for your suggestion.  It's been happening for the last 4 months or so.  The laptop is about 4years old and works great apart from this.

Do you have any suggestions as to how I can change fan speed settings?  I've searched through control panel and the power settings but can't find anything about altering fan speeds, even on advanced.

[DaveLembke]

Speedfan has a feature that allows you to set fan speeds by % from 0 to 100% speed. This feature works on most models, but not all. It requires that the fans be pwm controlled and that the fan pwm controller able to be initialized by the software.

http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php