Spontaneous computer reboots

northrop

northrop

grumman
2FA
Joined
Sep 27, 2005
Messages
11,723
This is baffling me to no end. My computer keeps rebooting, but its behavior is rather unusual. It will work fine for a month or two, and then one day it reboots 5 times. Today is no different. It rebooted itself 3 times already, yet everything’s been working flawlessly for the past few months. Actually, it hasn’t rebooted since May if I recall correctly.

NOD32 finds nothing. SpyBot S&D and AdAware are up to date as well. Memtest, HD diagnostics didn’t come up with anything suspicious. So what else?

Specs:
700W Seasonic M12 PSU
EVGA 680i mobo
Intel QX6800 (stock) cooled by arctic cooling freezer 7
2GB XMS2
EVGA 7900GS (stock)
320GB WD master drive
1TB Seagate slave drive
WinXP SP3 (almost 2 years now since the last fresh OS install)

System temps by SpeedFan:
System: 17C
GPU: 60C
CPU: 52C (average of 4 cores)

I was thinking that perhaps the room temperature might have something to do with it. My room is notorious for high temperatures, with 80-85F being the usual temp here. The rest of the house is usually in the mid 70’s… no clue what is causing it, but it sucks.

The common factors for the reboots are running Winamp, uTorrent, Photoshop, and Firefox. The four are always on when it happens. Also when it reboots, I hear the music stutter for about 3 seconds before the screen goes black.

So, does anyone have any ideas what to do with this? Anything will do.
 
Check out the Event Viewer in the Administrative Tools control panel. If you see some warnings/errors there that may point you in the right direction. If you see some and you don't know what it means post here with them. That should get you started, but it sounds like a hardware issue not a software issue. Do you have a spare PSU you could try?
 
the only Errors in the log are related to the Firefox, and are quite dated (Firefox v1.9 so it's been a while).

no spare PSU to try. oh well. it's been working well today again. i guess i'll wait til the next crash to work this out. thanks for the tip!
 
Have you run memtest? Try that, also try running prime95 and see if that causes it to reboot. If it does then it might be mobo, ram, cpu or PSU (unlikely it's the cpu, and the PSU you have is a good one so I kinda suspect ram/mobo could be something else but those are the most likely suspects)
 
Random reboots are characteristic of PSU problems... I'd say next most likely would be the mobo and memory in that order. Try testing the voltages(including under load), then try just using individual sticks of memory.


edit: make sure 'automatically reboot' is disabled.
 
MaStaFLaSH said:
Have you run memtest? Try that, also try running prime95 and see if that causes it to reboot. If it does then it might be mobo, ram, cpu or PSU (unlikely it's the cpu, and the PSU you have is a good one so I kinda suspect ram/mobo could be something else but those are the most likely suspects)
Click to expand...

ran Prime95, left the computer on, and when i came back about an hour later the computer was off.
question: when i started testing i heard a "clicking" sound coming from the case. couldn't locate the source either. i thought it might have been one of the fans, but that wasn't it. is this normal?
 
Clicking sounds aren't normal, only thing I can think of at the moment that causes clicking noises is a bad harddrive, try running some tests on your HD(s) it might be going bad.
 
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