Spungfoo

Heya all.

My comp has been randomly restarting lately and for the life of me I can't figure out why. It's been doing this for about a week now and there's no pattern to it - I could be doing anything (browsing, photoshop, watching a movie, etc.) when it happens. Other than this I've been having no other problems. If anyone has any info on this it'll be greatly appreciated.

My specs:

WinXP pro
Soltek SL-75FRV mobo
athlon 2600+
ati radeon 8500
1024 MB DDR ram 2700 speed

cheese

I have the same problem, i tun a win 98 AMD K7 750 gateway....yea its a paice of shit but i have been told that that is due to Dips in the power Grid, or the wiring in your house. I would suggest buying a UPS. thats all i can think of.

cj22009

Could be a faulty power supply they will cause restarts randomly also reseat every thing in the pc ram video card sound card you get the point if reseating every thing dont help download some type of mother board monitor your pc might have came with one and monitor your voltage if you notice drops then its probably your psu

rubicon

Random restarts and freezes are also attributed to faulty RAM. Try pulling out / switching / replacing your memory chips and see what happens.

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fuelmyfire

control panel -> system -> advanced -> startup and recovery -> under "system failure", uncheck "automatically reboot"

tronewy

i would say mostl likely it is the power supply that is the problem. happened to both my computer and a friends.

The_Dude

i can think of two things,

1) power supply cant provide enough power

2) system (or proc) gets too hot and automatically shuts down. check your temp in bios.

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wraithhibn

flaky RAM or a cheap, flaky PSU can do it quickly

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Jolt

How long will the machine run before it reboots?

Less than 1/2 hr? most likely processor-related. check your heatsink, fast.

Longer periods than that? more likely a memory or power issue.

Turning off that "Automatically reboot" setting will show you the BSOD error message if one occurs; write it down and google it.

pilot123

check your power supply and your ram. If your powersupply is to small it may be powering down when it overloads. For your setup you should have at least a 400w if not a 500w power supply. As for the ram, I had the problem like that when one of my ram chips went bad. Pulled each one out one at a time and found the cause of the problem. I agree also on turning off the auto reboot thing.

Spungfoo

Well I turned off the Auto reboot but haven't encountered a random restart or a blue screen since I wrote this - it only hapened once every 1 or 2 days and i have my system on 24/7, but I will check to see if it's the ram that's causing the problem - I have a 450 watt PS so I think that's enough juice for my system. Also, my apartment has really ancient wiring so that could be the problem also - I found out when I tried to install a UPS and the none of the outlets in my house were grounded.

Antagony

^ ^ ^ Do that first. Ignore everything else until you do this. Blue screens sometimes provide helpful information.

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sweeze

my friend's box had similar problems... .thought it might be power spikes, bad accessories, bad OS installation. pulled out all the PCI cards, put in new video card, got the surgeprotector of death, reinstalled windows/redhat. still didn't work. replaced the motherboard (VIA chipset == doom) and everything's happy now... could defintiley be hardware failure

cheese

NOOO HArdware faluire BADDD latly mine has been dieing every 20 min or so


cheese = poor cant afford new hardware....must fire up 133 for internet BAD!

VeXteR

Restarts are almost always a power issue involving the CPU. This is usually caused by the Powersupply itself. But you can get the same kind of reboots from the power regulation circuit on the mainboard.

For reference, a common AMD system with 2 cd drives, 2 hard drives, 3d vid card, and 4 case fans prolly needs at least a 400 watt supply to guarantee troublefree operation.

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cheese

How do you find out the Wattage of you PSU?