Computer randomly restarting

silk186

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 26, 2008
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My computer started randomly restarting yesterday. I assumed that it was a virus, however, after rebooting it rebooted again in the middle of a reboot, prior to windows even starting. I'm not an expert but to me this indicates that it must be hardware related. I'm studying in China currently, where i build my computer. Warranty is not a problem but I don't have any spare parts with me to test. Is the motherboard or the PSU the likely culprit. How can I confirm? I'm guessing PSU based on this recent issue. My computer is drawing a fraction of what the PSU should handle. The overclock is not extreme and the restarting is happening during web browsing and watching a movie, not gaming,
 
I would say the RAM is probably a more likely suspect. Your PSU is a reliable unit so I don't think it's very likely that it has a problem.
 
RAM? I never heard of ram going bad, however, ram should be much easier to test. What software could I use to test the ram?
 
RAM is much more likely to fail in my experience than motherboards, PSU, or CPUs.

You can use a program called HCL Memtest.
 
HCL memtest actually works much better for me than memtest86+.

Memtest86+ is the other one that you would want to use. However, you need a spare USB flash drive, and your computer needs to boot off that flash drive to run memtest86+.
 
it seems that HCL Memtest is not well suited for testing so I will try one of the others.

I believe it is more suited than both of the above. Only because it finds errors faster so you do not have to run memtest86+ for a weekend to be sure you are fine. You can instead launch 4 to 8 instances of hclmemtest so that you have near 100% coverage and run that a few hours while using your machine.
 
I ran 7 runs of Memtest86+ with no errors found. HCL memtest says to run with everything else shut off. I will try it tonight.
 
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