I encountered an interesting situation last night on an Intel NUC running Windows 10.

I hope others can have a chuckle about it, and/or speculate as to what happened.

The unit runs headless with a hdmi dummy plug installed and is managed using TightVNC.

I had an issue recently where it shut down due to heat so I looked into what software I could use to monitor its temp. I settled on HWINFO 64 bit. I connected via VNC and downloaded the portable version. I launched it and after poking round in the device manager pane I clicked Sensors.

Immediately the screen went pale blue, Windows briefly displayed 'Locking' and the VNC connection dropped. Looking at the NUC it was now off.

Dear reader, you have the advantage of the spoiler in the subject line, I did not.

Had it just overheated and shut down co-incidentally when I clicked that button? Touched it, felt a bit warm, nothing crazy.

Pressed power button and waited for it to boot, after about 5 seconds, back to turned off. OK, time to connect a monitor and see what is going on here. Plugged it into my monitor using the hdmi port. Manually selected hdmi port on the monitor and pressed the power button on the NUC again. See the intel logo and the spinning dots, and then boom, back to display port input on the monitor. Check on hdmi, nothing. Look at NUC, damn thing is off again.

I plug in a keyboard to the NUC and spam F2 as I power on. Switch monitor to hdmi. At last a sign of life, I'm in the bios. Temps seem a bit on the high side (90c). Leave it in the bios with a desk fan aimed at it. Temps don't fall. Turn it off and take it to the shed to blow out any dust with compressed air.

After the tear down and dusting the unit is showing 45 degrees in the bios. Right, this time I will be able to get into Windows? Surely? Nope, same trick, monitor decides no signal, goes back to display port and NUC is off.

Insanity now ensues for a while, until I just just by luck catch on the monitor the login screen for Windows, followed by the message that Windows is Hibernating.

Press and hold power button for 5 seconds? Nope, that hibernation file is on disk, not RAM, removing power doesn't work.

The solution? Time it so the the power gets cut halfway through resuming from hibernation, then next time you get a clean boot.

The machine doesn't have hibernation configured in power options or shutdown settings. I've previously used powercfg.exe /hibernate off for machines with puny drives where the space is needed, but after this I might do it on this box.