Machine Randomly Turning Off :(

Danger Phoenix · 11 Mar 2008 at 18:13

My housemates PC seems to be randomly turning off or rebooting, and we can't seem to work out why. Twice today every machine in the house turned off, but I think that was power related, but the other times it hasn't affected anyone else's.

What is the first thing we should check? The machine is a fairly new build (been around a month), but this has problem only started in the last week or so :confused:

Grumpy · 11 Mar 2008 at 18:16

Is all the power in the house going off? or are you overloading the circuit?

FrannoBaz · 11 Mar 2008 at 18:57

PSU on its way out?

davethe11 · 11 Mar 2008 at 20:12

could be a ram problem - if there are two sticks in there take one out and try with the other, then try the other one (the memtest application maybe worth using to check the modules too).

Could also be a driver issue, if you are using xp then by default blue screens of death error messages are not displayed and the system just reboots upon some kind of fatal error in windows - you want to prevent windows for automatically restarting so you can see the error message in future (if this is in fact the source of your problem):

right-cick my computer, select properties
select the avanced tab
click the startup and recovery settings button
remove the tick out of the Automatically restart check box

the next time the error occurs you will see a nice blue screen of death with some information that may help you trouble shoot the problem