Hey all,

Here's an annoyance thats really getting up my nose. My computer boots up fine.. I get to the desktop.... and after sometime it simply restarts!

I don't have any idea what to do, I tested out my RAM with a memtest, nothing came up....

Any ideas? Please help.

Netnut.

IIRC, something that happens after the computer is warmed up for a bit is usually a hardware issue. It could be something that "shorts out" and restarts the computer after it's heated up and flexed a little bit.

I remember working on a computer that had a similar problem. Turned out that one of the screw connections on the motherboard would move, ever so slightly, when the computer was "hot" and touch the metal screw offset below it, causing the system to shut down. (The screw hole was off just enough that you couldn't put a screw through it into the offest mount, but no one thought to remove the useless offset).

If the problem happens all the time, you might want to take a look at the motherboard and case to see if there may be a small piece of metal that could be causing the problem.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

Ok... will do that. But once windows restarted, it did the usual scanning it does on the hard drive.... and showed me some errors on c: which incidentally is my windows partition. Once I got to the desktop, I found an Icon missing from my start menu... and that exactly was the program which had caused the "crash"

I hope this leads to something... thanks crystal.

Netnut.

Well, turns out that the fan in the SMPS had failed causing it to burn out... due to which the power supply was erratic causing frequent restarts. Got the SMPS changed, everything seems fine now.

Netnut.

At least it was an easy fix.

Once, while in college, I had to build my own computer for my workbench. The computer would power up then mysteriously die, over and over again. The instructor and I thought it might be the motherboard so he got a new one. That one had the exact same problem.

He had bought the motherboards from a local vendor so he went to the vendor and explained the problem. The vendor did some troubleshooting and discovered that the whole batch of motherboards were bad. Turns out that somewhere in the inter-layer connections of the motherboard, the copper tracings for power had broken between some of the layers. The result was that once the motherboard heated up, the flexing of the components caused the tracings to move apart and lose contact, shutting down the system.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

Well... that problem you mentioned is a tough one. I can't imagine a whole batch of motherboards being shipped out as defective. Don't the manufacturers test 'em before shipping... so much for their Quality Checks!

Netnut.

Checkout the RAM