Morning folks, I'm typing this from my other laptop right now.  I just built a tower for gaming and I'm having an issue with windows 8.1.  It will randomly turn off anywhere from a minute or less after launching and logging in to 5 minutes after launching and logging in.  I can't seem to tell what's triggering it either.  If I try to do anything a screen comes up with a sad face emoticon and tells me that something is wrong but I can never read the full message before the computer shuts down completely.  It's not a soft landing either it's as if I held down the power button.  If you can tell me what information to give you I'll try my best.  My concern is I won't be able to get error or crash logs because if I try to do anything the computer shuts down.  I'm currently sitting here not moving and letting it sit at desktop to see if anything happens.  So far it seems stable to it's only when I'm actively doing stuff.

Concerns I've seen people bring up, yes it is a legal version of 8.1 and yes I did activate the product, I wasn't able to set up my wireless adapter before the computer would shut down so I had to activate it over the phone, it didn't crash during that.  From there I was able to install the wireless drivers successfully and actually access the internet.  But as I was heading to a speedtest page the window came up and my computer shut down again.  From there it has shut down multiple times after just minutes of trying to get online and install a game. 

I've gone into BIOS and disabled the fast boot that someone has mentioned and I changed my power settings to be on high performance and turned off the timed shutdowns/sleep/driver shut down.  I don't think it was any of that though because, 1, it's still happening and 2, those things were if it was shutting down after so long mine seems more random and in a much shorter time span.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

edit: I'm going to keep this updated, I'm at the moment installing my motherboards drivers/utilities.  Apparently I forgot to do that from the disk.  If that's the case and fixes it then I'll let you all know.  I still need to install these and whatever is on the disk saying 'afterburner' lol.  This is my first time ever building a pc and I'm doing it with no help so bare with me.  Took me all night to figure out I had a couple things wired wrong with the hard drive and a couple fans.

• Edited by darianfrost Monday, March 02, 2015 1:00 PM

Okay so after installing the drivers and doing some updates after things were installed the computer ran well for a good few hours.  In the mean time I was watching youtube and reading a different forum while I was downloading a game.  A couple hours in the computer BSOD'd again but this time I think it's more manageable as I was actually able to read what it said and it was the more common one saying an issue occurred, and your computer needs to restart and it is collecting data.  It then shut down very quickly as if it were a hard shut down and did not reboot on its own.

I'm going through the same actions again and waiting to see if it reoccurs or if it was a fluke.  I don't have the DMP files at the moment because I had to change the setting after reading the guide because it the folder wasn't in windows.  It still isn't there after I made the changes and rebooted but I think that's because an incident hasn't happened yet in order to create the file.  In the mean time I turned off fast boot as it seems to be a common instigator of the problem.  I'll get back to you if the problem arises again with the proper logs and dump files as it seems the computer is stable enough to actually navigate there now.  Woo!  Progress!

• Marked as answer by Karen HuMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Thursday, March 05, 2015 9:38 AM