Computer help

Anyone here work in the IT field or really know their computers or knows someone?
I'm having some issues.

Did you reboot it?

I may be able to help, what's going on?

Right now as soon as windows boots up it shuts down the computer. I used an old hard drive to see if it was the drive or some corrupted operating system files and it did the same thing. Trouble shooting suggestions of course say to replace each hardware component one at a time with a known good one to find out what is causing the issue but I don't have any compatible extra hardware lying around since usually by the time I upgrade my computers the form factor changes and I have to change everything at the same time.
I was hoping someone maybe had some test equipment or knew a good service or someone that could do house calls since I am not very mobile right now.

Matt, did the external drive have a bootable version of the operating system? Did you do any diagnostics prior to windows booting up (I forget which key you need to hit to go into diagnostics). On the other hand, I do have an older HP windows 7 PC that I was planning on giving away, as it has no hardrive (my version of windows 7 crashed and I decided to upgrade to a new PC). It's yours if you want it.

The old hdd has windows 7 pro 64 op system on it. It all booted up and then continued into shut down and then computer turned off. Same thing happens with both hard drives. Tried repairing drive with Windows disk but it found no errors.

Can you see any error messages before the shutdown. One of my computers did that but it gave me an error message saying it was shutting down to prevent damage to the computer due to a fan malfunction. It turned out to be the CPU fan.

No error msg comes up. It just logs off and shuts down. I checked the CPU and mother board temps in bios on immediate reboot and they are room temp. Well below any critical temps that would shut comp down.

weird that it happens with two diffferent hard drives. My best guess is the issue lies with the power button staying "depressed" and telling it to shutdown (it's what happens when you press the power button while windows is running)

Does the keyboard have a shutdown button and have you tried another keyboard.

Alternatively if you have another computer pull the power button out and try that. Or, if you are up to it, pull the power cable off the motherboard header and short it with a flathead.

The last thing to do is check and see if it will boot into safe mode. After it posts (bios messages) hit f8 a few times and get the menu up and tell it to boot into safe mode. If that works let me know.

I think you got it with the power button Jt. I disconnected it from the header and it seems to have stopped the issues. I then reconnected it and the computer ran for about an hour and then just shut down on me and kept trying to reboot and shut down. So i removed it again and tested it with a volt meter. The button sounded normal and didnt seem to be sticking but when i put the meter on it most of the time it still read low level continuity. So now my reset button is the power on/off switch until i find a replacement. Thanks