Random restarts, help!
 

Yet another hardware question here. title says most of it. I've been having problems with my pc restarting randomly on me fairly recently. With light usage, ie. playing basic games, browsing the internet & email, I might get 2 restarts a day, but I just got Max Payne recently, and when I try to play that I get restarts often enough to just about make the game unplayable (and i've noticed this with brood war also, so i don't think its that particular game). Would this be, as i suspect(only a theory really), a problem with my memory, or is it something else, perhaps even operating system related? any help from some of the more knowledgeable among you would be greatly appreciated. thanks. let me know what other info you might need also.

What brand of motherboard do you have? I had an 2 Epox boards that did that. The later of the two stopped doing it after I flashed to the latest bios, fomatted the hd, and reinstalled everything.

I'd flash to the latest version if you haven't already.

This is probably not necessaary to ask, but are you sure you've got sufficient cooling on everything? A buddy of mine built a new machine for another bussy of ours' parents. It ran great, but would crash and reboot at random, and more often when being used for gaming. It turns out the case fans simply couldn't get much air through the machine, causing it to run too hot and get glitchy. When I moved the tower out of the little computer desk cabinet thing and built a duct to channel the flow of an extra 80mm fan to blow into the bottom two PCI slot holes, it suddenly ran like a champ.

another thing i would check is the RAM.
i have returned ram a few time for that reason.
if you have an extra stick of ram... C if that is causing the problem.
my 2 ¢ worth

well, the motherboard is a DFI (diamond flower international, i think) AK75-EC. i'm not sure if there's an updated bios for that or not. I had considered the cooling because i did relocate it to a computer desk, but the cpu temp only reads around 44c atm. I'm running firebird, winamp, and bunch of random little stuff, i ran sandra's burn wizard and got it up to 50c. and it still idles under 40c and overall is only a few deg higher than when it was in open air, so i dunno. unfortunately i don't have a spare stick of ram to test with (that's what i'd like to do), but if it is the ram, i'd seriously consider replacing the motherboard, i've got a stick of 256DDR lying around. the motherboard only runs 133 bus (it sucks)

In my experience, excessive heat usually manifests as BSODs...(though I wouldn't rule it out)
...random reboots were usually either from a failed component (memory, cpu, pci card) or voltage fluctuations from the PSU.

Are you/have you been running MBM so you can check for temp/voltage fluctuations that started recently?
What OS are you running? Does the task manager show any new, unusual apps running? Is your PC using more memory than usual? Could you list all components in your machine, including removable media that may be attached to add-in cards or USB ports?

What do the error logs say? :D

You might try checking the video (GPU) temps... I was having a lot of issues with reboots and BSODs. When I placed an additional fan blowing onto the video card, all of these issues went away... Not sure why video was causing a reboot, but that was the only thing I changed - course, it also blows onto the northbridge as well....

from my experience ... if any one component in your machine is failing...
the whole machine will be unstable...
I had to RMA an entire machine pice by peice untill i figured out my video card was killing everything :(

my 2¢ worth.. again... i guess that now makes it 4¢

I would try all the easy troubleshooting stuff first, especially before doing anything like flashing the bios. Before doing anything else, return to stock speeds if its overclocked.

> Take off the cover and put a house fan blowing into the case, run it like that and see if it still happens.

>Check all your connections, try reseating everything.

>Is it dusty in there? Blow it out if it is. I use my vacuum's hose connected to the vacuum exhaust port.

>Run a check for spyware/adware. Check for a virus if you dont already have a good antivirus running.

>Try not running apps in the background. ( eliminate everything you don't need as a starting point )

>Check any thermal management in the bios to make sure its not set to reboot the thing at a temp thats too low.

>Disconnect non-critical hardware like CD-ROMs, floppy, extra hard drives, lights, etc..

>If none of this helps, and you are lucky enough to have enough hardware in your possesion to try it, start swapping parts!

>Last resort... get drunk and kick it all around the house! Then buy/build that new PC you've been wanting! In fact, drink a beer anyway it will make you feel better.

Good luck man, PCs can be a real bitch sometimes. Please post back what it was when you figure it out for all us armchair troubleshooters out there.

If you seem to be able to 'force' a restart when playing Max Payne, you could probably take it to a local PC repair shop, and ask to test a new stick of RAM in your machine while you're there. The shop near me was more than happy to let me wander over to their testbench and let me try that quick, since I indicated that I had an interest in buying more RAM based on the outcome of that testing. :D

well, components, i've got the previously mentioned DFI mainboard, and xp1800 proc, 40 Gb hd, geforce4 mx 420 graphics card (hence i'm a little skeptical about that overheating), modem, nic, Benq 52x burner, generic dvd, 16x2 lcd running crystalcontrol v.1.06. and this is all hooked through an energizer 450VA ups. and i've got Windows XP running.
its not really overclocked, @136 instead of 133 (that way i can actually claim 1500mhz)
as far as voltage, 12v rail is usually 12.50 - 12.54 and 5v rail is 5.00 to 4.98, the power supply is a 400W enermax. and its the newest thing in the system. haven't noticed any apps, but since its xp, the processes list is a bear. but overall memory usage is holding
pretty steady. and of course all i get is the ever so helpful microsoft error message "your system has recovered from a serious error, do you wish to report it to Microsoft?" I do like the idea of taking it to the local computer place, i'd just have to talk them into letting me do it, since i don't really trust them to do it. and trust me, when i get this fixed, you guys will be the first to know. :D

NOW I get it.

Go to CONTROL PANEL

Choose SYSTEM

Choose ADVANCED tab

Click SETTINGS button in the "Startup and Recovery" section

In "System failure" section, uncheck "Automatically Restart"

;)

good call AntiBling
that should fix it....
but the next question is why is he getting a system failure?

This was happening to me a while back. I found that advice on the web and it stopped the rebooting. Later I found adware on the PC that the wifey downloaded, 20/20 search or some such thing, which I promptly quashed. It wasnt easy, I looked up every damn app running by typing its name in the YAHOO prompt to see what they were, until I found the offender. Then I had to look up how to remove it. Adaware wouldnt do it.

An 1800+ should be running at 1533 (11.5*133) already...are you sure it's not a 1700+?

Also, try putting it back to default clock speeds. When I first got my Barton 2600+ (11.5*166) I tried running it in a KR7A-133 that I was using at the time. _Any_ degree of overclocking on the FSB led to instability, even though I had run high FSB speeds (212MHz) in the past with simply a different processor.
I also had a KT7E (much more similar to your DFI) that would run a 100 or 133MHz FSB, but was picky about other speeds unless I got it _really_ cold (box fan blowing 5C outside air into the side of my case :p ).

Good luck!

[Edit:] The aforementioned instability was the constant rebooting issue that Zog is having...

damn, i hope you figure it out, i know my little problem a while back took a long time to figure out :(

i'd definitely try it without the overclock tho.. my at7-max2+2400 will NOT run stable at even a single clock over default bus (although it will run fine at either 133 or 166). usually tho, it won't even start up... bsod's on its way into windows.

as far as spyware goes, you may try several variants. adaware is very good, but not definitive by itself. i usually run adaware and swatit, but i know there are others out there that are very good for this. keep ad aware, but run 1 or two others, may be interesting what you find.

Zogthetroll, I hope my trouble was worse than Yours. I also have a 1800+ and used to overclock it (phat watercooling, looow CPU temps). I had increasing instability issues with a KT266A based motherboard. Reboots under load, blue screens during startup (The bootable media could not be read, or something like that). Reinstall of the OS didn´t solve it, heck, reinstall even failed, bluescreens etc. I replaced the motherboard and the troubles disappeared. I guess I fried the chip set.
Expensive hobby.
Try with another MB, factory default speeds.
regards
Mikael S.

edit: OK, that was quite cocky of me, my water cooling isn´t by far the phattest around here, not even close.

ok, just to clarify. yeah, it is a 1700+, it was just bumped up to 1800+ speeds :) but it's back to stock now, and I found out it wasn't the RAM. I got another stick at staples and tested that. so I now have 512mb (max my board will support, did i mention my mobo sucks?) interesting story, the first time i went to staples and picked up the memory, I brought it home and went to put it in the pc, only to notice that the box that was marked 133mhz contained ddr memory instead. not too bad, just kinda annoying, so i had to go back and get that fixed. i just changed the reboot at system failure thing, and will do another search for adware and such. I have spybot installed, but a second opinion doesn't hurt, so to speak. :D thanks for the comments guys.

Any progress?

well, the problem isn't exactly fixed yet, but my pc is running a little faster thanks to the ram upgrade. :D I tried disableing the automatic reboot, but it still shut down windows so i had to reboot manually then, so I set it back. I ran adaware and found one or two things lurking on my system (interesting side note, my wife was complaining about the slow lab computer at work and popups on it, so I ran adaware and found OVER 450 items, including cookies, on that machine, wow) but no change after squashing them, so its looking more and more like its hardware related, possibly the mobo. once i've got more money, i'm going to build a server for backing up files, acting as a firewall, web host, etc. so what i'll probably do at that point is get a micro-atx to replace the current mobo, and use those parts for the server, and get my own pc upgraded. basically, just living with the problem until then. thanks for all the helpful hints so far.

quote- "my computer doesn't have bugs, it just devolops random features." *sigh* how true it is.

have you tried pulling or swapping things like sound card, vid card, or any other peripherals?