Computer Randomly Restarting

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Frizbe

Frizbe

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Frizbe
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Darth Frizbe
Lately my PC has been restarting rather randomly. Sometimes I can use it all night to listen to music other times it will restart by itself within five minutes of turning it on. I leave it off for the day while I am at school/work and mainly use it for music at night, I am using Vista Ultimate 32, but have a suspicion it is a hardware fault. When it restats itself none of my USB ports work, I have to manually restart to get them to work again which is rather annoying since my keyboard and mouse are wireless USB peices. When I turn it on for the first time at night it will Post twice and only display anything after the second Post. Not sure on actual specs but I use a AMD Althon 64 Dual Core GForce 8600 GT (? maybe 8800) 2 gigs of generic RAM and an Asus motherboard. I'm thinking something is wrong with the mobo, any input would be appreciated.
 
It could be restarting because of heat. Have you ever cleaned your desktop before(opening the case and blow the dust out with an can of air)?
 
I have been recently but it was working better when I had not cleaned it for moths although I had an extra fan, and then when with no side panel for a while until things got a little rough in bed and my pillow hit the power supply for the hard drive. :sly: Oops I meant 👎
I'm trying it with no side cover tonight for a quick test and tomorrow will try it with the side cover and fan back in place. 👍
 
Could be that it is getting a BSOD but is set to automatically restart. If you right click on computer, select properties, on the left hand side click Advanced System settings. Under the hardware tab, click settings for Startup and Recovery, uncheck Automatic restart under system failure.
 
So it crashed/restarted within 5 minutes of tuning it on and posting last night. Restarted into safe mode only to find out sound drivers are disabled and WMP doesn't start in safe mode (i really only wanted to listen to music and go to bed) Restarted in regular mode(?) and it worked fine all night. Same thing happened the night before crashed within 5 minutes boot into safe mode reboot and all is good. :confused:

DQuaN
Could be that it is getting a BSOD but is set to automatically restart. If you right click on computer, select properties, on the left hand side click Advanced System settings. Under the hardware tab, click settings for Startup and Recovery, uncheck Automatic restart under system failure.
Click to expand...
I found it under 'Advanced' but did turn off the auto-restart so we will see what happens next time.
 
My dad and I narrowed it down to the video card by accident today. After taking out the video card because I didn't bring my DVI cable to his house I noticed the computer posted once like it should. After some other stuff I've determined the video card was probably overheating, blew the dust out and all seemed well for about 20 minutes when the computer restarted itselft again. Even after I changed to setting to not auto-restart I have not verified that the option is unchecked though.

But an overheating video card should really only cause display problems right? I can't understand why a bad/overtemp card would restart the computer, I'm lead to believe the mother board might be bad or specifically the PCI-E port for the video card.
Yay, nay on the Mobo being the culprit?
 
ROAD_DOGG33J
It could be the power supply. What power supply is it?
Click to expand...
Bossman at work suggested this gave me a new PS and it ran fine last night.
Old PS was a 300W the video card requires 350. New PS is 350W and I'll most likely buy a 500W in the comming months since I have no idea how old the 350W PS is.

Got the new PS installed whent to boot up NTDLR is missing, fix a bad boot sector and now my Windows is not Genuine. :ouch:

I hate Microsoft.
 

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