PC rebooting randomly!

[julianhj]

My 3.5 year old self-build machine has started rebooting without warning occasionally.

My wife has had this issue on a couple of her work machines which was traced to the HDD on the way out/packing up. Is this the most likely explanation for this type of fault, or could it be any of my components?

I have a P4 3.2Ghz, Asus AA8 motherboard, 1Gb Corsair RAM, Maxtor Diamondmax 10 320Gb HDD...

If it is the HDD, I'm probably going to buy this: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-120-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940

Can I do better for that sort of money? I've heard lots of good stuff about WD, and have recently bought a 500Gb MyBook Premium which I'm very happy with.

Thanks in advance...

 

[steve258]

Can be anything really if it doesn't display any error message. PSU/motherboard/memory/HDD. Would help if you have other components you can swap and test.

It happened to my office machine at work placement last year. It started out rebooting every so often but eventually it got so bad I couldn't even boot into windows without restarting itself.

 

[Curio]

Firstly, tell Windows not to auto-restart if it encounters a crash - I can't remember where that option is exactly....have a dig around and find it. Then...

If it still restarts with no errors or no warnings then it's most likely a PSU problem. Possibly something else power related....a short....a faulty connector on the mobo (check all your connections while you're at it) or even dirty electrical mains in your house, but in my experience that sort of restart is a dicky PSU about 80% of the time. If you're getting random power-offs as well that's another sure sign of a bad PSU or power issues.

If you now get blue screen errors instead of restarts then you're probably looking at faulty memory. Try running Memtest or Prime for a couple of hours and see if it throws up any problems.

The hard drive could be the problem, although in nearly 20 years of using PC's (and having many bad HD's) I've never seen it cause restarts. Usually you'll get warnings like corrupt files, programs not working or Windows just not loading. Not saying it's not possible, just never experienced that myself.

Finally, it could be software. I've had video card drivers "go bad" and cause restarts for example. And just the other day my machine became totally unstable (restarts, blue screens, etc) and I traced it to the new Spybot shield running in the background.

Really this kind of error is all about the good 'ol process of elimination

 

[IAmATeaf]

If it's an old PC have you done the obvious open her up and give her a clean, you might dust and crap clogging things up which won't really help.