Since I upgraded my old laptop to Windows 10 it keeps shutting off randomly.

My kids use it to play Steam games but after a while it simply turns off. In Terraria, Portal, bridge constructor, not exactly a demanding game.  Can it be overheating? Is there some other problem with Steam and Windows 10?  I found some articles about Terraria crashing with Windows 10, yet in my case the whole laptop simply turns off. There are also some articles about windows 10 overheating laptops, yet the thing has made much more fan noise with windows 7 and never simply turned off. Could it be that the fan speed controller isn't working properly? Bridge constructer uses < 10% cpu, yet if the fan never speeds up maybe it slowly cooks?

Does anyone have experience with reverting back to windows 7? Is it simple or are there risks? I cleaned up the laptop already before upgrading to windows 10 so there really isn't much more on it than Steam and Firefox.

There is a failed Toshiba hotkey driver update, yet I doubt that has any effect. The rest seems fine. I'm running a test now, cpu temp is at 57%, fan speed 63%. Of course it won't shut off while I'm looking lol. Maybe it's something as simple as my kids hitting the off button without realizing :/ Well no, can't be since it has to cold boot after. It's a real crash.

Try wiggling the electricity cord. Maybe it has become too loose and it disconnects on its own making your PC to shut down (assuming batteries aren't in place or in place but dead).

Do you mean the fans were louder with windows 7? if that is the case then it could be that win10 is having some issues talking to the temp sensors in the laptop and telling the fans not to bother reacting to it overheating. In a laptop btw even a basic enough game will heat up the cpu a good deal if it doesn't have a dedicated gpu.

If it's a heat issue, there are many ways you can tell. The easiest is touching the laptop and feel how hot it really is. If it's too hot, that's a good clue.

If not you can try this to check the exact temperature (no installation required):

https://www.techpowerup.com/realtemp/

Pretty sure I'm having the same issue, and it appears to be demand related.   With regards to steam, check to see if you have thumbnail caching on, if it is, turn it off.  Steams resource demands exponentially increase, if thumbnail caching isn't turned off.

For me, I can't run WoW and a Skype video session concurrently, my system just doesn't like it.  Though, my PC is quite old at this point, so I'm pretty sure I'm reaching it's limits.  However, when I stopped doing that, my system stopped randomly restarting.

Y'know upgrading old laptops/whatnot to windows 10 usually screws it up.

You should've stayed with 7.

I'm not sure where to find that.

While testing portal 2 it does seem to be demand / heat related. After alt-tabbing to the game it runs fine for 30 seconds, then starts to get slower and slower, staying in the same spot. Frame rate drops from 30fps to less than 10 while turning. FPS is fine again directly after alt-tabbing. At least I know the fan is still working as I can clearly hear it speed up and down. Maybe I'm expecting too much of it, it's just a 2.2ghz i3 with integrated graphics.
The weird thing is it still doesn't go over 50% cpu utilization according to the task manager with multi core rendering enabled. It might melt though if it did lol.

It's not crashing now while stress testing it ugh.

The fan is still speeding up and slowing down, yet with win 7 and Firefox the fans have been going at high speed for long times while heating up anything next to the laptop considerably with the exhaust. (Good to keep your coffee warm lol) It's running a lot quieter now, yet turning off randomly. I've felt it a lot hotter too before. It doesn't have a dedicated gpu.

Ah, it just did it. I pressed escape to go back to the menu in Portal 2. Fan speed was normal. Laptop doesn't feel that hot. It just turned off.
No clue. It boots back up from scratch with no info about restoring from a crash or anything, as if it was properly shut down all the way. Portal 2 is not a good example anyway, doesn't run very well. I'll let Terraria run for a while next.

Well if the fans were heating up the stuff around them it is them working properly, if the heat is being shot out of the laptop that is good for it, you could try one of 2 things first, turn off the laptop and put something like a tooth pick into the blades of the laptops fan (to jam it to stop it from being able to spin loosely) and then use compressed air to blow down the vents at the back (you can do it by blowing yourself, but make damn sure that you don't have any spit in your mouth that you could blow into it, dry = win) second thing you could try would be to go into the BIOS of the laptop and find the area related to performance monitoring, check if there is an area relating to cpu

you could try putting this up by a degree or 5 and see if that stops the amount of times that it auto turns off, especially if you are sure that the underside of the laptop isn't actually dangerously hot.

Maybe your board keeps desoldering itslef ala Xbox 360 RROD. 😆