Not sure if it's safe to do a factory reset

KS93

Estimable
Jun 3, 2015
2
0
4,510
I've a Lenovo Z500 Touch that I bought off someone a few days ago. He reinstalled Windows 8.1 and its drivers for me (and it seems he used it for a couple of things before sending it to me as well).

Within the first few minutes of starting it up for the first time, it shut itself down. No logging off or 'shutting down' screen or anything, it just shut down without warning. It's happened well over 30 times since then. It seems to crash about every hour or so (if I'm lucky, two), whether I'm using it or not. Event viewer shows it's a "Kernel Power" error. I've tried so many things but nothing seems to work. I've only made things worse as Windows now refuses to update since the shutting down keeps interrupting it, and it won't check/repair my hard drive either.

The person I bought it from and I are both pretty sure it's not a hardware error but rather a driver/Windows thing. After doing a scan, it showed there were two viruses on the system as well (I got rid of them but who knows how much damage they could've done). The best thing to do I can think of right now is to do a factory reset and see where that takes me. I'm just not so sure whether I should. I figure I'd be in deep if my laptop shuts down during the reset and I'll be left with a laptop that won't boot (especially as Windows says it can take several hours).

TL;DR, is it safe to do a factory reset when my laptop keeps unexpectedly shutting down for no reason?
 

KS93

Estimable
Jun 3, 2015
2
0
4,510


I tried to do a factory reset a couple of hours after posting here. The laptop shut down in the process and rendered Windows unbootable. I had to reinstall it, and the shutting down is still happening. After opening the laptop up and taking a couple of things out and putting them back in, the time it stays on has now halved. It shuts down EXACTLY 30 minutes after boot (I've been timing it). When in BIOS the same thing happens except it restarts and starts Windows normally. The laptop doesn't shut down when after 25 or so minutes I put the computer to sleep. It's like it resets the timer and gives me another 30 minutes before it shuts down.