Yeah, some games are really weird like that.
My last computer could run skyrim, new vegas, and dark souls 3 all at the same time, no problem, but seemed like it would catch on fire if I tried to run vanilla minecraft.
Just tried it on my desktop and still a no go. I even tried running it as an administrator while running as windows 7 AND 8, even tried XP just to cover all my bases and it still shuts itself down no matter what. Even checked my CPU and RAM usage and it both were running in the green so I'm not sure what's going on here.