Windows 7 unexpected shutdowns

demanufactured

Hi,
Have a strange issue with a group of PC's on a domain.
The PC's are in commercial garages and connected to our datacentre over the WAN.
If the users are using the PC's all is ok, no issue.

At random times if the users walk away from the PC and come back some time later it will be unresponsive - black screen.

The PC will not reposnd to ICMP requests while in this state and cannot be accessed remotely.
the only way to resolve at the time is to get the user to kill the PC by powering it down at the tower and booting it up again.

Windows is showing an unexpected shutdown occured at one of the first events created after windows is reloaded.
No hardware events are recorded
I cant see any other events that could cause this.

Im not convinced it's a power issue yet as there is no loss to power to anything else on site.
There are roughly 400 or so of these machines out in the network and it can occur with 1 or 2 maybe a few times a week , with maybe the odd occurrance of 50+ PC's being in this state first thing in the morning.

No stop error is being displayed at any time.
I have installed bluescreenview on a few of these machines to see if anything is captured.
Windows is upto date and the PC's are getting the correct group policies from the Domain Controller.

Not sure what else we can check.
I was convinced at one point that a windows update may have triggered something but not so sure now , ant find anything on release notes that would point to anything really.

Any advice would be appreciated.

ItHurtsWhenIP

I'm going to hazard a guess that the unexpected shut down error is from the user power cycling the PC to get it to work again.

I didn't see you mention anything about the power settings - could the machines be Hibernating after an hour or two?

demanufactured

Power settings are controlled through group policy , none of the PC's should be hibernating.
As the PC's are all getting the correct group policies its a bit strange to have this happening.

And you are probabaly right that the shutdown is recorded when they power cycle the box.

demanufactured

Anyone else ever come across this?

Xterminator

yep, i saw similar power management settings were to blame.

to be certain, setup a test OU in group policy, and add a few machines into it. apply an always on power management policy to the test OU, and monitor. (or exempt from power mgmt policy and manually set power mgmt properties).

i understand it may not be hibernation per se, but it does sound like something in power management and what ever driver it is not co-operating with.

d31b0y

Moving away from possible software issues...

Are the garages very dusty? Could be a dust build up.
Are the machines left on indefinitely? Schedule a restart / power down at a specific time.

Realistically though, 10% of the machines being affected by the same thing in one night doesn't really sound like a hardware issue to me.
Check any custom drivers, maybe for a specific piece of equipment that is in use with the PCs.

Kimbot

Power management issues, even with Group Policies they can mess up so removed the group policy and then reapply it and see if that changes.