Help On Resetting Issue

schiller

Junior Member
Aug 16, 2006
2
0
0
I'm trying to figure out what's going on with my PC. It has a Tyan Thunder K7 motherboard with dual Athlon MP 1800 CPUs and 512 PC2100 RAM. It's running Windows 2k.

I've experienced instability issues in the past (occasional bluescreens, random reboots). In the past they seemed to be when the PC was in a hot/humid environment. About 3-4 months ago I moved the PC to the cool basement and hadn't seen any instability issues until about 2 weeks ago.

Now it seems that whenever I attempt an operation that might be intensive I can get reboots occuring. Actually the computer stays in some indeterminate state (no display) which requires me to forcibly cycle the power.

The two scenarios in which I've seen this happen consistently is:

a) Trying to perform an update on my rather large SVN repository. When I attempt the update, the reboot is immediate. Note that this only happens when I perform the Update at the root of the repository, when I perform the update on a nested subdirectory with a smaller number of files, there is no reboot.

b) Encoding/converting raw AVI video to MPEG. This operation can normally take hours. I kick off the operation and it goes along fine, but then somewhere in the middle the machine will reboot.

I know this could be many things, but I'm guessing it's one of two: either overheating issue or a bad RAM problem. Any pointers/suggestions?

I'm going to try and improve the airflow in the system tonight to see if that has any effect.

Thanks,
Jeff
 

stu1811

Senior member
Nov 9, 2005
405
0
0
To test your ram download memtest and let it run overnight. If that passes then you need to look into additional cooling for your cpu.
 

MichaelD

Lifer
Jan 16, 2001
31,528
3
76
In order of suspicion:

1. Power supply
2. Bad stick of ram (run Memtest86)
3. Overheating
 

schiller

Junior Member
Aug 16, 2006
2
0
0
Thanks. A colleague of mine also mentioned the power supply - I have a funny feeling this might indeed be the issue. I also remembered that I did run memtest somewhat recently without any issue.
 

amdskip

Lifer
Jan 6, 2001
22,530
13
81
Power supply for sure then unless your motherboard has leaky capacitors. Google it!