A friend is having issues with his PC, and I need a bit of help.

[Jayson]

I'd help him directly but he lives very far away. Just recently, as he was away from his PC for some time, it suddenly restarted and live messenger did not work anymore, but from this point on, it randomly restarts, there is no set pattern, might be a few hours to a few seconds. I had adviced for him to clean it, to see if that was it, but the issue persisted, told him to re-seat the RAM, nothing, run with one RAM at a time but it did it again with both, but I doubt both failed. I did tell him to run memtest86 later. I have no idea what it could be.

 

[Jayson]

Oh, he told me just now, that on the restart, the error report mentioned kernel32.dll

Could this mean a virus?

 

[ShawnD1]

It could be a virus. What kind of antivirus software is he using?

Also, ask if his computer is overclocked. A bad overclock can slowly corrupt files until eventually the computer just doesn't work anymore.

 

[Jayson]

Thanks for the response, but I haven't heard from him in hours. Guess his PC succumbed to whatever it was.

 

[laezyre]

A dying power supply can cause frequent, random restarts. I've seen if several times in my office.

 

[Matt1970]

Originally posted by: laezyre
A dying power supply can cause frequent, random restarts. I've seen if several times in my office.

Agreed. Power Supply would be the most common cause of random reboots.

 

[Wolfbeta]

Originally posted by: laezyre
A dying power supply can cause frequent, random restarts. I've seen if several times in my office.

What about random shutdowns?