Thinking hats on folks......

[BigJay]

My mate Chris, sent me this.....

"I know it is the hardest thing in the world to diagnose but can you else give me an opinion. I have a theory but will keep quiet as I don't want to bias opinion.

My puter just crashes for no reason mostly. I can leave it on all day sometimes no probs, I can on other times leave it aloneand it will just reboot itself. No error messages, no blue screen etc, just POp reboot.

it has ample memory 1gb in two sticks. BUT and here is the but, if I ask it to do any graphics work like photoshop, corel draw etc, it will crash after a minute or two. So is it when it is put under load/ or when the memory usage is being pushed (because of the undo) or when the processor is being put under seroious load?

Any theories and more importantly fixes. IE are there any free diagnostic tools I can run? I bought a registrychecker and that did nothing really although it has given me peace of mind that I have a nice clean registry LOL.

I am running win XP pro it has all the Sp's and updates done as well.

Cheers Jay"

My first guess would bea stick of bad memory......what do others think?

 

[Ian]

Overheating perhaps would be my guess, but I would run memtest on the system to check the RAM too

 

[muckshifter]

Power ... or lack of it.

 

[michael 118]

Lack of Power or dodgy GPU. Has he got the lastest drivers?

 

[Anon_F]

Hard Drive?
But more likely to be PSU??

 

[V_R]

Heat is my guess.Or maybe the PSU aint giving out enough power.

Whats the pc specs?

 

[BigJay]

Heat is my guess.Or maybe the PSU aint giving out enough power.

Whats the pc specs?

I've just mailed him asking for his specs.

 

[V_R]

Nice, make sure he tells you the PSU rating.

 

[PotGuy]

Yeah sounds like overheating/lack of power. Has he checked his fans are working?

 

[Anon_F]

I've just mailed him asking for his specs.

Does he not wear contacts

 

[floppybootstomp]

As the others have said or........ the reset switch is stuck on a little bit.

Don't laugh, that happened to me once, took a squirt of WD40 to sort it

 

[Edison]

I'd go with overheating. check temperatures in BIOS if its possible or via Windows with appropriate software; bound to be high and the extra work load is pushing it over the edge.

Check Heatsinks on the CPU (main culprit) and Northbridge/Southbridge chipsets and GPU (least likely). Are they firmly in place? if not redo them with some decent paste.

May just need to clean the dust out of the heatsink fins and remove any dust from front and rear exhaust inlets. Perhaps some fans have packed up.

Let us know how you get on...

 

[Spezi]

My guess is heat due to fouled up heatsink and/or CPU fan is dying and behaves erratically.

I had one unit do exactly that once and the culprit ended up being the CPU fan but I wouldn't have guessed it until I took the side panel off and happened to notice it's speed was inconsistent whereas at first inspection I simply looked to see if it was moving which it was.

A couple of blasts of air to clean the unit, swapped out the fan and no more issues.