PC restarts within minutes and BSODs...please help!!

[Sulaco]

Hey guys,

First off, this is my system:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Clawhammer @ 2.5Ghz | Chaintech VNF3-250 | 1gb Corsair PC3200 RAM| Enermax 535W PSU | eVGA 6800 Ultra | Onboard audio| Seagate 200Gb SATA 7200RPM HDD | Sony 52x24x52x CDRW | Lite On 16x DVD | NEC/Mitsubish DiamondPro 930Sb 19" | Altec Lansing 251 'Gaming Theater' 5.1's| Windows XP Professional |

Anyway, It's been running flawlessly all up until this morning. I left the computer online a few hours to download a song (mp3) from WinMX.
Upon returning to the PC, I find its been downloaded successfully, and close out that window to find my new mp3, and my computer just reboots.

Upon restart, I again open a few folders, and within 30 seconds or so, it reboots again. Now I'm really concerned. So I go into BIOS and reset all settings to "fail-safe defaults", just in case.
Reload WIndows, and again, within a minute, its restarting.

So I go into device manager and disable"Automatic restart" when there's a problem, and now instead of restarts, I get a Blue screen of death which reads:


"A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

(some advice about going into safe mode)

Technical Info:

***STOP:0X0000000A(0x00006,0X0000002,0X00000000,OX805252D2)

Beginning dump of physical memory. Physical memory dump complete."

Also, I've noticed that if the machine just idles on the desktop, the restarts and BSODs don't seem to happen. It's only when I'm opening files and folders.

Could this be a virus?? Thats about all I can think of, since right up until getting this song I had no problems at all. What can I do??

PLEASE HELP! And thanks very much to those who reply!!

 

[surreal1221]

Would hate to say it, but have you ran memtest86? Looks like there is a memory issue someplace.

 

[2cpuminimum]

Does the problem persist if you underclock? Reseat the memory? How long was it running before this problem occurred, a day, a year? What is the temperature in the room, and of the cpu?

 

[spherrod]

Temperature would be my first guess, but try memtest as well - let it run overnight

 

[Sulaco]

First off, let me say thanks to everyone for the replies.

Anyway, it seemed whenever I would try and do "something " (open a file, do a search, play audio), it would reset (or, after disabling automatic restart, give me a BSOD).
So i booted into safe mode and fooled around, and none of the problems seemed to occur. I could practically anything without a crash/reboot/error.

So just for kicks, since this only seemed to happen immediately after downloading this file from WinMX, I went ahead and used System Restore to restore to 2 days ago, before downloading and using WinMX.

So far...*knocks on wood*...there've been no problems for about 12 hours, everything seems to be working fine again.
If I have any more problems, I'll post, but so far, so good.

 

[surreal1221]

Good deal, still do the virus scan, etc, kinda obvious I suppose.