A friend's computer had been suddenly rebooting
after being on for a half hour or so. It would
happen to him every day. I thought his power
supply might be sagging so I took my supply and
put it in his machine and put his suspect supply
in my machine. He has been running fine every day
for about a month now but e-mailed me today that
he had another sudden reboot (the only one in
about a month). His machine had only been on for
a minute or two before this reboot occured so I
don't think heat has anything to do with it. His
old suspect supply has been running my machine
just fine. I'm going over there on the week-end
to give his machine a good cleaning, fan lubing etc.
but I can't think of what could be causing this
(very intermittent now) rebooting.
If anyone has a suggestion of something I could
try I would appreciate it.
I would suggest do the following :
1 - Memtest : you can get memtest by burning a mini distro of linux.
like Knoppix. Knoppix is also a handy toolkit in case you need to
recover data before reformatting stuff. So google it up
Reseat/Clean/Replace memory module if necessary.
2. Check CPU temperature : somebody has suggested this already. Rising
CPU temperatures may cause reboots since the ACPI side of the bios will
halt the whole system once a specific temperature is reached.
3. Try using HijackThis : Using that would let you check any programs
that may load during startup. It could be a trojan/malware/worm that is
causing his PC to reboot. Use reliable antivirus and dont forget to
update.
4. Do benchmarks : doing benchmarks would give you a big eye view of
how the computer performs and make considerations/recommendations on
how to fix it.
5. Check for any kind of invalid/broken tweak for video. Sometimes
tweaking the VGA card too high may cause failures. Reinstalling the
Video card would make the settings go back to its default state.
6. Investigate on what program hangs and if necessary, download
appropriate patches for it. Patch your windows as well.
My two centavos.
- Keech (PH)
TIA,
Carl