Okay so I built this PC around October last year, it was my first experience building one, but I had a lot of help from an experienced friend. It had been running fine, but recently it has been randomly restarting. It used to do it only in winamp, so I thought it was a soundcard problem, so i upgraded my card but that still didn't help, so then I switched over to using foobar2000, it still happens. The restarts appeared to be happening less but it still happens. It has restarted in the following situations: playing music, surfing the internet, playing hitman 3, and just deleting and avi. I dont know what to do at this point. I ran memtest86 over night, 29 passes so I know that my ram isnt the problem. Does anyone have any suggestions? My specs are: Intel P4 2.4 1 gig RAM ASUS Mobo Geforce FX 5600 Audigy 2 ZS 120gig HDD Floppy DVD rom DVD-RW 480watt Antec True Blue PSU Thanks in advance.
A couple of things could be happening here. A.)Your computer could be infected with a wonderful virus, like the blasterworm. B.)Your CPU might be overheating. How's the airflow in your case? Do you have a virus scanner like Norton on it? How old is the PSU? You have a good one, just if it's old or full of dust that could cause a problem. Age is minor, dust would be the big problem. Hope this helps
I have scanned the pc with norton and AVG and they have come up with nothing. The airflow in the case is good, i have 1 outtake fan in the back and 2 cooling fans for my hdds, plus the one for the cpu. The psu is new, got it around jan or feb this year, but I will check it for dust next time im inside my pc. How can i prevent my cpu from overheating if that is the problem? besides more fans of course. Thanks for your ideas
Are you by any chance overclocking your cpu? If so, that will cause your CPU to run hotter than normal, and might trigger your computer to reboot.
nope, haven't delved into that scary part of modding my computer yet. maybe on the next computer i build, but this one is running at normal speed.
Which OS are you running? If it is Windows 2000 or XP, go to the Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer. Many times a log entry there will give you a clue to what the problem is that is causing it to reboot. Check both the System and Application logs and see if you have any error messages at about the times the reboots have occurred.
