This question doesn't have a lot to do with Linux, but the LQ community has been very supportive of me in the past, and I trust you all as advisors.

Several weeks ago, I bought a Dell Latitude E6420 and installed MX Linux 19.4 alongside the native Windows 10. It's been running fine thus far, and it's almost become my daily driver.

Until today.

I booted Linux up and got to work on a project...only to have the computer shut down at random after only a few minutes of work.

I was unable to start it up again, so I thought it might be the battery. Accordingly, I left it to charge for a few hours and came back later. I was able to boot up, and I saw in the Linux power manager that the battery was fully charged.

Then it shut down again.

And now, every time I boot into Linux, the computer shuts down of its own accord after a short time. If I let it sit for a few minutes, I can get it to boot up again, but with the exact same results. I timed one iteration of this process, and the time from beginning of boot-up to shutdown was a grand total of two minutes.

By the way, this problem is not limited to Linux. I tried booting into Windows, and the laptop crashed before the boot was even finished.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there anything I can do about this? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

P.S.: In case anyone's wondering, I can boot up without the battery as long as the laptop's plugged in. It seemed to run a little longer than with the battery in, but it ultimately crashed, too.

Bought where, how? 10 years old is pretty old to be buying with expectation of reliability. Has it ever had its cooling passages cleaned? Does its fan work? If you put it on a cool surface or other means of maximizing air access to the bottom, does it work longer before shutting down? Random shutdowns are usually hardware component failure, or overheating a critical component, such as CPU. Running longer without battery weakly suggests a cooling issue, as batteries elevate temperature, in part by blocking air flow to the battery socket area, impeding heat rejection.

Agreed. I have a Dell i7 XPS from 2010, that I used to clean every 6 months or so due to a very dusty environment. Still works if I bother to turn it on.
Getting into it to blow it out is easy - about 8 screws then lever the entire back off.

I got this laptop on eBay, and it's actually a 2014 model. Close enough to 10 years, I guess.

I opened it up this morning to check. There's only one fan, but it was pretty much dust-free, as well as the rest of the laptop's interior.

Yes, the fan has worked since day one.

I used the laptop in a somewhat cooler environment this morning, and it worked for about twenty minutes this time before crashing. I kept the sensors application up while I was working in order to monitor the CPU temperature and see if that was the problem. However, the coretemp never climbed much past 120 degrees Farenheit, and it was at maybe 118 when it crashed. I don't know if this is significant; I just thought I'd mention it.

Start with the simple things - is there a setting in the BIOS for thermal alerts ?.
Else logs are always the place to look. Quick search shows MX uses sysvinit by default - I guess that means /var/log/syslog would be the place to start. Been too many years since I needed to look there to be sure.

I looked in BIOS and found a section reporting shutdown history. Two of the most recent ones gave the reason "Memory SPD access". Does anyone know what that means?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_presence_detect explains SPD. The message found could be reporting failure to access an SPD device on a RAM stick. Try reseating the RAM stick(s). If the laptop has two or more RAM sticks, try removing one at a time to see if it still shuts down. Running memtest86 or memtest86+ with both sticks present would be prudent as well.

1 members found this post helpful.

Do all of what mrmazda recommends. In addition, I can tell you I bought a refurbed Dell latitude several years ago(E5470). After confirming ram compatibility on Crucial's website, I bought some additional ram from them for an upgrade and had nothing but problems after installing it. Long story short, there was nothing wrong with the ram, but the Dell needed a bios update before the new ram would work properly. Dell's refurb center never bothered to update the bios before reselling the thing. So you might want to check for a bios update as well.

After reseating the memory sticks, I was able to run the laptop without any issues for upwards of an hour. I'll try using it for a few more days and see if the problem resurfaces. For now, though, I'm marking this thread as solved. Thank you all very much for your advice and assistance.