Restart problem

[bates550]

I've been having this issue on and off for the past year. The computer will restart/crash on it's own . Sometimes it'll happen several times during boot up, after a minute of use, after 5mins, after 10mins, etc. It seems like it only happens if I leave the computer off for an usually long period of time (more than a day), and it goes away after a few reboots.

But now I've also been getting the blue screen asking me to check my hard drive for corruption. It's a WD 80gig, warrantied not too long ago.
It almost never happens if I leave the computer on for a long time (this can range from 5hours to a week).

What do you think is causing this? The quarter just started again, so I'm paranoid that my computer will start rebooting/crashing during papers or midterms.

 

[spherrod]

Can you list your full system specs? OS, Memory, Motherboard, Video etc. If you could list the details of the Power Supply as well that would be helpful.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

First you need to turn off Windows "auto-restart on error" feature. Right click My Computer, select Properties, click the Advanced tab, click the Settings button under "Startup and Recovery", uncheck "Automatically Restart" under "System Failure".

Now when the computer crashes it may not restart and an error may stay up long enough to read it.

I would recommend you download the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility and run a full (advanced) diagnostic. The drive might be failing.

Next suspect could be bad PSU. Swap out the PSU with a spare. Note: A bad PSU may also be damaging the HDD. I had a bad PSU with leaking caps on my main rig. It would run fine while it was left on (runs 24/7), but every time I rebooted the PSU spiked the HDD and killed it.

Could be bad caps on the mobo. Look at the photos here and see if any of your caps look like this: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=195

Hope this helps...

 

[mooglekit]

Originally posted by: FlyingPenguin
First you need to turn off Windows "auto-restart on error" feature. Right click My Computer, select Properties, click the Advanced tab, click the Settings button under "Startup and Recovery", uncheck "Automatically Restart" under "System Failure".

Now when the computer crashes it may not restart and an error may stay up long enough to read it.

I would recommend you download the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility and run a full (advanced) diagnostic. The drive might be failing.

Next suspect could be bad PSU. Swap out the PSU with a spare. Note: A bad PSU may also be damaging the HDD. I had a bad PSU with leaking caps on my main rig. It would run fine while it was left on (runs 24/7), but every time I rebooted the PSU spiked the HDD and killed it.

Could be bad caps on the mobo. Look at the photos here and see if any of your caps look like this: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=195

Hope this helps...

<---- Agrees with everything above, nice work