My computer rebooted itself randomly in the middle of a game (Enemy Territory) last week and although it was odd, I tried not to pay too much attention to it. I believe it was after I upgraded my system but I'm not 100% sure. I took this system: Athlon 2800+ Barton Core Biostar M7NCD Pro motherboard Pheonix-AWARDBIOS 2X Kingston 256MB DDR (PC3200) Radeon 9600 256MB And put an Arctic Cooling heatsink and fan and some Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste on. I also put another half gig of Kingston PC3200 in. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the problem, so I thought I'd tell about it. Anywho, tonight while playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, my computer again, randomly rebooted. I don't believe it's overheating because my temp monitor said it was only at 49 C. But tonight, things got worse, while trying to play Enemy Territory tonight I got 5 random restarts and 2 freezes. So I tried to do a system restore to a point last week, and after windows reloaded it said the restore had an error and needed to close, then it said windows explorer had an error and needed to close, pretty much leaving windows useless. I then had to manually reboot. It rebooted and everything was fine, but I got another reboot while taking Enemy Territoy for a test run. So I sat staring at my desktop for a while pondering when all of a sudden my windows theme changed from 'XP' to 'classic' followed immediately by my task bar/start menu and desktop icons disappearing (like what happened when window's explorer closed) followed immediately by a reboot. However, when windows reloaded, it didn't even start to play the windows load up music before it did another random reboot. That happened two more times before I just turned off the computer and let it sit for 15 minutes. Here I am now with no problems thus far (I haven't taken my games for a test run and am affraid to). Does anyone have any idea/help/info for me? This really makes me want to pull my hair out. I've got a couple of guesses like maybe my processor is dying? Or I have a virus? But I really don't know. Please help me if you can.
Hi Halfbreed My wife's cousins laptop started doing strange things a while ago. Traced the problem to a bad ram chip. I forget the program that was used to test the ram but it was qhick to confirm the ram was bad. I hope this helps
Oh by the way, the first time the computer didn't reboot until after about 2 hours of gameplay. With RTCW tonight I was playing for over a half hour. Everytime it rebooted during ET tonight was while the game was connecting to a server, so basically no game time.
Halfbreed, I would run a virus check. Some of your problems sound like the things the worm virus causes. Desktop changes, rebooting, sometimes copy and paste stop working, desktop icons moving around by themselves. MSBLAST & MSLAUGH cause all of the above. Click start, then search for files or folders and type in the 2 above I listed. There are 5 or six versions of it, those are the 2 most common. If Windows finds either, you got the bug. Jerry
