COMPUTER RESTARTS! Help!

[PowerYoga]

i don't know why but my computer restarts randomly at times. Once when I was playing RTCW, and another time when i was watching a movie. What could be the cause of this problem??

thanks for the help!

 

[n0cmonkey]

Could be heat, could be some OS problem, could be driver problems. Pretty tough to tell without any information

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

it could also be a crap power supply.

is it just restarting, or is it BSOD'ing, and auto-restarting? go into the system control panel and turn off "reboot on STOP" or whatever it is, and see if you get a bsod instead of a reboot next time.

 

[ShaggyDogg]

Could be running XP and have "reboot on error" checked

 

[PowerYoga]

it can be the video card.... i recently switched to radeon 8500 a couple of days ago and the past 2 days it restarted twice randomly. I also have a 250w power supply, but it never gave me any problems before.

at any rate, this happens infrequently at most... any ideas why? (i don't think its heat)

 

[kellygirlbeads]

what os and hardware? are you sharing any interrupts?

I used to have an abit bp6/dual celeron box running win2k server (test box for a cs project) with a tnt2 . Every time I tried to load half-life, it would run for about 30 seconds, and then crash. It seems that the nvidia detonator drivers dont work with win2k server, despite working fine with win2k pro. So, my first suggestion would be making sure all of your drivers are for the right OS, and all of your hardware is on its own interrupt.

Following that, its usually a heat or powersupply issue. Your computer is shutting off during high load. High load brings two things: heat and a demand for power. If it can't handle one or the other, its going to reboot. If you have a hardware monitor, try running a demanding application that doesnt take the full screen (seti, dnetc, mprime), and see how the temperature and voltages vary. If the temp rises really really fast, or the voltages start moving around, you'll have a good idea of what's causing the problem.

 

[PowerYoga]

the strange thing is that i leave the computer running for days and it doesn't shut down, but today when i'm typing my report without doing ANYTHING other than d/ling stuff from bearshare, it reboots when i was "bolding" my sentence. It doesn't reboot when i'm burning CDs, playing games, but when i'm typing my report. (thats for only today anyways)

Could it be a low power supply? I don't really think its a heat issue though my CPU runs at a rather warm 50~ degrees. (AMD retail fan)

 

[ThaGrandCow]

That sounds very much like a underpowered power supply. What wattage are you using. What are the specs of your computer?
EDIT: BTW... that sig is perfect for this thread


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