Is my psu on its way out?

[Atlantean]

I am not sure if it is the power supply or win2k pro, but yesterday outta the blue, my computer restarts itself. Everything came back up fine, and it ran fine, so I clicked on sasami2k to play a music video and boom it restarts itself again. This was like instantaneous, it didn't shut down programs or do anything like that. One minute it was my desktop background the next the startup screen. So when it came back on again I watched a music vid and when I tried to play another one it restarted again. I was getting pissed off by this point, so I thought I would try a different program, cause maybe it is sasami2k, so I tried divx player(aka the playa) and same thing happened. The computer all in all restarted itself 8 times yesterday and has done so 4 times today (been gone most of the day so I haven't been doing anything on it and there were no restarts during the day). Is this problem being caused by win2k, or is my power supply going?

 

[Legendary]

Could be video card troubles...maybe not the PS at all.
Have you changed around your video config recently? Or hardware in general?

 

[Atlantean]

yeah I oc'd my video card a week or so ago, but then I clocked it back down, thinking that that might be what the trouble is. I am pretty sure it is win2k, cause why would my vid card cause problems like that? It shouldn't just shut my comp down completely.

 

[labboss]

I have a PIII 800 at work that is doing something like that. Whenever I go to save a file, 20% of the time it will result in the system shutting down. The monitor light turns yellow and I have to reset the system. Not bothering trying to figure out what is going on because "dude, I'm getting a Dell". Actually that's the mentality of our IS department. If it breaks, get a new one. This has been going on with other computers of the exact same CPU/mobo combo and they used to replace the power supply and that seemed to fix it. That was before we signed the deal with the Dellvil

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: Atlantean
yeah I oc'd my video card a week or so ago, but then I clocked it back down, thinking that that might be what the trouble is. I am pretty sure it is win2k, cause why would my vid card cause problems like that? It shouldn't just shut my comp down completely.

I'd say it's the supply if it's still doing it after you put the card back to it's normal specs. My old geforce 2 caused my system to do the same, I was using w2k too. The problems went away after I got a new ps.

 

[Atlantean]

Damn what a pain in the ass. I installed winxp pro yesterday, but accidentally set it up for dual boot, so I will be reinstalling it next week. I think it might be the os, but not 1000% sure. So I will give that a try if it doesn't work I guess I will be getting a new psu, should I get a more powerful one? I have 365 watts now, but I am thinking that I should get 550 watts cause then I have more power if I need it.

 

[JBT]

550 Watt is kinda over kill all you need is a good quality antec or something quality is alot more important than quantity. Have you guys ever thought of bad RAM I had bad ram it would do that when I used certain programs.