Attn Computer Savvy People, Please Help!

[dontpunkme]

Ok, so I got a new computer a few months back. When I first got it, it woulld sparingly spontaneously reset itself for no apparant reason. I didn't worry about it then because it was very rare. Now the computer is doing it multiple times a day. If I try to play any games I get about 3 seconds worth the game in, and whammo! What could be causing this? What can I do to try to fix this? Any help here would be awesome cause I'm going out of my mind.

 

[Psionicist]

Random reboots can be caused by many things:

Heat: Insufficiently cooled processor/videocard.

Power: Insufficient power to processor/memory/videocard.

You should do the following things first.

1) Download Prime95 ( http://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v238.exe ). Run the torture test (one of the options in the program) for 12 hours. The torture test will do really heavy computation and will report if the processor calculcates something wrong.

2) If the above works out fine, run memtest. Download and burn this program to a CD: http://www.memtest.org/ Boot your computer from the CD to run memtest. This will test your memory. Run the program for an hour or so.

I'd like to know what hardware you use. Processor, motherboard, memory, powersupply. It'd also be interesting to know temperature and voltage readings (you can get this from the BIOS).

Good luck.

 

[The_lurkeR]

Psionicist is right, it's probably heat.

The first thing I would do is get a can of compressed air, open your case up and clean it out. Make sure all the fans are still spinning when the PC is on also.

 

[IronWolf]

And if its not heat, the memtest app Psionicist suggested will find any bad memory stick you may have. Great tool.

 

[Aeson]

On a similar subject my parents computer starts fine and works ok for awhile. After runing awhile if they start any app it will take forever if at all to begin. I can't seem to figure it out. I think it could be a memorey leak. It is a 2.5 ghtz with 512k memory and winXP. Any thoughts?

 

[Psionicist]

Aeson: Try Diskcheckup. http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm It will check the SMART status on your hard drive. SMART is a very small program running inside the controller logic of hard drives that monitors degraded performance, read errors and such. DiskCheckup works by asking the harddrive if it feels OK. It's not 100% foolproof but if the disk is dying the program will probably find out.

 

[trancejeremy]

On a similar subject my parents computer starts fine and works ok for awhile. After runing awhile if they start any app it will take forever if at all to begin. I can't seem to figure it out. I think it could be a memorey leak. It is a 2.5 ghtz with 512k memory and winXP. Any thoughts?

I think WinXP is just something of a memory hog, and needs at least 1 gig to run well. I recently installed Win Xp (x64) about a month ago on my computer, and I was amazed at how lousy it ran. Then I installed another 512 megs of ram (bringing it up to 1 gig) and it runs great.

 

[Aeson]

So you think its the harddrive and not the memory?

 

[Psionicist]

Regarding the original problem: A very common problem with custom built Athlon64/Pentium4 systems with powerful video cards with freezes that only happens when playing games is too low voltage to the memory modules. The default voltage to DDR SDRAM is 2.5v but memory from many manufacturers such as Corsair and TwinMOS want up to 2.7v to work stable. It all works fine and dandy until the video card starts working and drains some juice from the RAM, with crashes/stability problems as a result.

I'd run Prime95 and Memtest first though, because too high RAM voltage is not good either.

Edit: This is a very annoying problem, because although it's sort-of memory related Memtest cannot find this problem because the video card is not working hard when running that program.

 

[Psionicist]

So you think its the harddrive and not the memory?

There's a small possibility it's a hard drive problem and I'd check that first so I can backup all files ASAP, if that's the case.