PC Restarting By Itself (even after new HDD and rebuild)

[onestar]

Okay, not read thread too carefully, but as mentioned, random crashes can be due to any faulty hardware.

Okay,

1st look at your board. Look near the CPU. Check the Capacitors, see if the tops are flat, or puffed up. The age of your board, P4, there were a batch of bad caps around that time. This will affect the quality of power to the CPU resulting in reboots reboots....

2nd have you run memtest? You can find the website (google memtest), download a bootable cd and run that to test your memory.

3rd test your harddrive(s). Goto to the manufacturer website and download their diagnostics software.

4th overheating. Get a desktop fan, and leave that running over the main board to check it. May have to leave for a while seeing you can have days of no problems.

5th check your event logs, sometimes errors there can point you in the right direction.

In all my experience, I'm afraid almost every cause has had random reboots as the symptom.
Lack of sufficient power (upgraded to 400w)
Bad CPU
Bad Memory Dimm
Bad Board (caps)
Bad Disk (bad sectors)
Video card failing (fan failing)

[mixedup]

thanks guys (really appreciate the help)

Well....I memtest has run for 2 hours 2 mintues put stopped with "Unexpected Interrupt - Halting. Type: INV-OP, PC:fff864e2, CS:___"

BUT during it's operation (I burnt the image to CD and booted) there were heaps of errors being thrown up:eek: There were pretty much constantly heaps of read errors flowing through the bottom half of the memtest screen. The screen readout where it froze was:

Pass 82%, Test 17%
Cached 1280M
RsvdMem 76k
MemMap e820-std
Cache ON
ECC Off
Test Std
Pass 0
Errors 7817120
EccErrs 0

I've rebooted and back on the air ok on the problem PC right now typing this.

BACKGROUND - I did a few months back now upgrade the RAM. I put 1GB in but using some of the old memory to fill the 3rd slot to bring it to 1.25GB of RAM.

NEXT STEPS: Guess I should try swapping out the RAM modules from the slots and rerun memtest hey? (got some stuff to do today but hopefully during the weekend) I downloaded from http://www.memtest86.com/memtest86-3.2.iso.zip

QUESTION: Do you think memtest was working properly for me, I mean my PC is working now but it was showing 100000s of errors? :confused:

Tks again

[mixedup]

thanks - I'll try this next - seems like a neat idea (i..e ultimate boot CD)

[onestar]

Thing is that suggests the ram is bad. I personally think memtest is pretty good, and should find an error very quickly.

Have you checked your board as well? Real quick check of the capacitors. Assuming thats ok, I vote for Ram problems.

And yes you can be getting errors, but your PC is working fine. Its just
(a) the error didn't happen
(b) the OS is not using that memory
© the error was a data error so you never noticed

But as you changed the RAM recently....

PS I like ultimate CD too, but for a memtest, I think memtest is better

[ZaHayNa]

As a repair tech, the most frequent problem I've seen lately in hangs/reboots is cheap RAM. I recommend Corsair, Kingston, or my favourite, Shikatronics. I have had absolutely no problems with any of those brands. But that generic stuff is crap, and it's not even that much cheaper anymore (I can get 1GB DDR400 for like $90-something.)

Power supplies (especially if overheating due to a bad fan) can cause this too, but as I said above, RAM is more frequently the problem lately with computers I've been fixing.

Also what kind of board do you have? If it's ECS, that is MOST LIKELY your problem right there. They are crap boards. Pure crap.

Hope that helps.

[mixedup]

I think I may have it

So memtest & windows memory test shows me that when I upgraded (early this year) to more memory there is a memory problem with using one of the older memory sticks to complement the new.

That is I have 3 slots which is used:
- 2 x 512MB (New memory)
- 1 x 256MB (Old memory) <=== ERROR

With the 3rd slot free (i.e. don't use the older memory at all) I get no issues with the test, however if I use EITHER of the older 256MB memory cards in the 3rd slot I do get an issue.

Have now left slot 3 free (i.e. drop back to 1GB RAM not 1.25GB of RAM). I'll see how this goes but it seems to be the problem (interesting that I've lasted for months like this but its only in the last few weeks I've noticed things)

Thanks for all the help

[mixedup]

Thanks Tipstir

My old RAM (just looking at it) is KVR266X64C25/256.

My new RAM (from the order - as its in the PC now) is "512M PC2700 DDR RAM". Can't quite remember if I got the generic or the Kingston.

Not sure if this is enough info or whether (perhaps I have to reboot to get more details about the new memory which is now in the PC). Would be interesting to understand why the issue occured I guess, but ultimately I'm assuming by verification that the old and new don't mix so I'll be needing to leave the old memory out.

BTW - Amazing the difference in performance on the PC just due to the new HDD and the windows rebuild. I think the latter in particular probably helped me out a lot. I had had so much crap installed under windows over the last 2 years


Tks again

[HtV]

Afaik, you have 266 and 333 mhz memory. You could try changing your memory settings in bios to more conservative.

[mixedup]

I think I might just leave things for a while - I'll be good to have a stable system & I'm not sure I'll really need the extra 256M above and beyond the 1GB - you think it might be an easy BIOS change in the future to allow the two types of memory to co-exist ok hey? Does seem to take about an hour to run a memory test, so playing with BIOS changes and retesting could take a while no?

[HtV]

so playing with BIOS changes and retesting could take a while no?

Yes