machine turns off after ubcd loads

[nycjeff]

So I'm trying to help my friend with her laptop.
Its slow as syrup and the hard drive is always spinning. I figure it's a problem with the hard drive. I copy her documents folder to another drive for backup.
Then I run UBCD on her machine. It seems to pick it up just fine. it loads up. I get to the blue menu screen. Then if I don't do anything within like 10 seconds, the whole machine just shuts down. I was able to get one of the hard drive scanners to do a default scan, but even after that was done, (no errors fwiw) then the thing shuts down again.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
At first I thought it was the hard drive, but after the machine shuts down after ubcd starts up, I'm now thinking its memory. I'm going to do more scans on memory tonight, but was just wondering if anyone else has seen this sort of thing before?
-j

[nycjeff]

well, now it quit during the memory test. odd. trying the hard drive again, just to see if it makes it through.