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PC Powerdown

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BigMelt

Programmer
Aug 19, 2003
1
GB
Hi. I have a problem with my PC turning itself off. Usually this is quite soon during the boot sequence but sometimes it can be several hours after use. It first started doing this intermittently a couple of months ago. At this point I dismantled all components and reassmbled. This solved the problem for a short while but now the problem has returned. The board is MSI-6585 with a 2.0GHz P4 chip and 256MB PC2100 DIMM memory. The board, chip and memory are only 6 months old and their off back to the supplier if I can't resolve the problem. Any help would be gratefully received.
 
Hi

What other sort of troubleshooting have you done?.

Try leaving the case open, and have a fan blowing in, see if the same thing happens. Could be due to overheating, but since you said it happens sometimes soon after/during boot sequence, most likely not.

Maybe try booting the comp in safe mode, see if it still happens. If so, may be overheating or hardware related.

Another majot cause of re-booting is not enough power to your machine. What size of PSU do you have?
 
Just ran into a machine that was doing the very thing you described. Turned out to be a corrupted graphics driver. Changed out the driver and all was fine.
 
Is this XP? The logs will tell you what is going on.

Start, Run, eventvwr.msc

Look in the System logs to see what error messages prompted the restart.

Post them here if you need further help.
 
I had a similar problem with my machine at work. First I replaced the power supply, and that seemed to fix the problem for a week or so, then it started rebooting again. So I checked the memory - there were mismatched speeds, so I swapped for new memory all of the same type. Again, it seemd to fix the problem for a few days, then the computer started rebooting again. Ditto for driver updates, power management settings, etc.

In the end, it turned out that some of the little "transistor" type things on the motherboard itself were going bad - swollen and malformed like a battery going bad. Replaced with identical motherboard and the system has been working like a champ ever since. So I would open your case and take a very close look at the motherboard components.

--Roc
 
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