My old laptop keeps shutting down, WHY?

as for your laptop shutting down and not starting again, this could mean that its rechargable battery is not holding charge anymore and needs replacing, but as for the freeze ups, there is a number of things that can cause this, windows clutter,cpu breakdown,ram overload,windows os registry corruption,etc.etc. without seeing your laptop no tech could tell you a definate answer, but dont go buying a new 1 if the problem is repairable, why pay 1500 dollars for a new laptop if a tech can repair and update your old 1 for a couple of hundred dollars. for example: i just built a core 2 duo for a friend and it only cost her 840 dollars her friend went and bought a new 1 exactly the same from a computer shop and it cost her 1600 dollars, thats almost double what my friend payed me to build her 1. so in some cases its cheaper to refurbish an old computer than it is to buy a new 1. people who go out and buy a new comp every time the 1 they have starts playing up are either fools with too much money, or big noters trying to be better than the jones lol. i have had the same computer for 10 years, all i have done is upgrade the internals, it started out as a celeron 588 and now its a quad with core2 duo processor and 2 terrabytes of sata hardrives, and i am still running the same big bulky 17" monitor i got 10 years ago. the high tech part of a computer is whats inside not what it looks like on the outside.

try going to start control pannel and get the sysytem properties up (were device manger is ) and go to advanced tab and start up and recovery setting and uncheck the one that say automatic start on the system failure bit as this resart your computer even if i has a tiny error

if your laptop is more than two years old, i would recomment to buy a new one. two years is a good time to predict that a computer is really old and needs to be change. honestly, it is hard to trouble shoot a computer without know what happened prior to what it is doing right now. my best advice would be is to go to geek squad and let them fix it for you. i would like to change or replace my computer sometime next year because that's the 2 year anniversary of it. i like to keep up with fast changing technology.

is there any way that it could have a virus on it? because if it keeps shutting down like that, that could be a good possibilty (hubby's a computer geek and i asked him...)

You should have put up a picture for this so they could see what it looks like and also maybe tell what the model number and type of computer it is so they can give you advice on maybe its the certain brand of computer that does that commonly or something along those lines! I'm thinking probably a virus maybe ruined it?