- Your Chromebook might keep crashing for a variety of reasons and we can only hope they’re not hardware-related.
- Perform the Hardware reset by pressing and holding the Power button + Refresh on your Chromebook.
- You can also try restarting your Chromebook, Powerwashing it (factory reset), or restoring it with a USB.
- If even the restore doesn’t fix the problem, we suggest taking your Chromebook for repair.
Why does my Chromebook keep shutting down by itself?
Your Chromebook might start shutting down by itself for different reasons and what we can do is deal with the software side. Like any other system, ChromeOS is not perfect. And, over time, it can run into issues, slow down and, ultimately, start crashing. There are 3 things you as an end-user can do.
1. Restart your Chromebook. The first thing to do is restart your Chromebook and try again. You can usually force power off Chromebooks by pressing and holding the Power button until the screen turns off. Power it on again and check if the Chromebook still keeps crashing. If yes, the next step is to factory reset your Chromebook with the Powerwash.
2. Perform a Powerwash. Resetting a Chromebook to factory settings usually fixes most issues and is a relatively straightforward procedure. If you have some data stored locally, make sure to back it up because Powerwash will restore the system to factory settings, clearing everything in the process. Later on, you can use your Google Account to restore all settings and apps.
Here’s how to perform a Powerwash on your Chromebook:
- Back up your files to Google Drive or Google Photos.
- Open Settings.
- Then expand Advanced.
- Select Reset settings.
- Finally, click Reset.
3. Restore your Chromebook with Chromebook Recovery Utility. The final option you have at your disposal is to use the Chromebook Recovery Utility extension to create a recovery USB drive and restore ChromeOS.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Plug a USB flash drive into your PC with at least 4 GB of free storage. Make sure to save its content because the following procedure will format all data.
- Open Chrome on your Chromebook or an alternative PC/Chromebook.
- After that, navigate to Chrome Web Store and install the extension.
- While in Chrome, select the extension from the top right and click Get started.
- Select your Chromebook model from the list and click Continue.
- Choose your USB drive and then click Continue and click Create now.
- Now, on your Chromebook, press and hold the Esc + Refresh buttons. While holding these two, press and hold the Power button until your device powers off. Keep pressing Esc + Refresh and let go of the Power button.
- Once the message on the screen appears, you can let go of Esc and Refresh, too.
- Select Recover using an external disk and follow the on-screen instructions.
And, on that note, we can conclude this article, and thank you for reading. We hope that one of the instructions provided here helped you solve the issues. Also, it’s important to mention that the system stability will get worse over time if your device is out of AUP (Auto-update policy) and your Chromebook doesn’t get regular updates. Tell us more about the problem in the comments section below and we might be able to provide additional insight.
