My PC recently restarts/reboots itself suddenly when im in the middle of sth. Somtimes after a few hours, then after that, it occurs very frequently like every 5 mins. Ive used TuneUp utilities to check registry, Ad-Aware, ESET anti-virus to try & find the prob to no avail. Registry's checked, no viruses, or spyware. Recently cleaned the inside & vacuumed all the dust, so it's not that. Whats wrong with the system? anyone can tell me what to do to fix this? PLEASE HELP, thanks in advance!! [very frustrated abt this prob] :( i have: an HP P4 desktop running Windows XP SP2 512Mb RAM 80Gb HDD abt 60% full installed Vista Inspirat Ultimate 2 for 5months Office 2007 Ultimate recently Folder Vault recently ESET NOD32 anti-virus business edition recently been using uTorrent recently left overnight for 2 consec days [is it damaging my HDD making it restart??]
your hard drive might be dying, your ram might be dying, your computer is getting old.. things die by now.. need to replace some stuff.
That's what happend to 2 HP computers I bought (kept restarting every 5 min), will never buy HP again. I have a Sony Vaio that's 3 years old now and it has no problems. You might want to buy a cooling fan for your comp it may be overheating.
lol.. my problem right now is that my rig doesnt turn off. thinking it might be a virus or spyware (highly unlikely) or some setting i forgot to turn off, or some program blocking it from turning off.
yeah hp pc are rubbish think u should buy a new one too, i got a hp and it used to not letting shutdown lol plus recently upgraded to 2gb ram n found out the mobo dont like it now n again my pc restarts if i run too much program at once think its shite psu too what processor u got btw? should try bakup n reformat ur hdd
I bet you the capacitors on the motherboard burned out. You can check it by looking at the capacitors surrounding the CPU. If the caps bulge up on top, then it's burnt. If it is, you can attempt to replace the caps yourself or anyone with soldering skills. I've fixed several of my friends PCs successfully this way. Not surprisingly, one of them was an HP. It had 7 blown caps.
it seems to me a heating problem, check ur fan, cos u say it restarts itself every few hours. thats bcos it has overheated and then every 5 mins once u turn it back on which means that the computer has overheated again. this is what the comp does to protect the hardware when it overheats. it could be from ur graphics card but then again ur not playing games. this is quite stange, perhaps from the motherboard or possibly ur fan has died or is not functioning properly. i doubt its a power supply problem bcos that would mean it will keep switching itself off from the off and sometimes u won't be able to start the comp.
to eliminate software side problems, do a complete reinstall of your OS (i say XP) and with minimal (or no extra) programs and only install critical drivers that you know work if there are no restarts it means that you had software problem like a conflicting driver, if even a reinstall of the OS doesnt stop the restarts your looking at hardware issues Could get a hold of a Linux live CD like Ubuntu and run linux and see if your comp restarts even with linux, again indicating hardware issues. unfortunately with these problems, it takes a long long time and lots of effort to find the real cause, if there are no obvious ones
ahaha... even if it's useless... it's completely true something definitly is wrong... whoever said overheating is probably right... but I also think it's PSU or RAM as well...
i had this problem, everytime i had my usb stick connected the computer would restart like 5mins after its still pluged in also i found that utorrent messes up my windows wen i come back to the computer in the morning, freezes everything slim chance theyt might be your problem but imo jus do a reinstall?
it is usually a hardware malfunction, could be one of the fans stop working and it is over heating, im not sure of course.... but then again it could also be software sided and if you can save your data save it and try and reformat it and if the problem continues its hardware.....
i've checked the fans only yesterday and ive cleaned out all the dust. All the fans work properly, so it's not overheating prob. I find that my PC usu uses 80% of RAM on startup, and when uTorrent is on, this restart prob will most likely to occur. Someone told me it is becos frequent use of uTorrent program will damage the HDD and so it restarts often. Is this true? There are so many possibilities of the causes, yet i am too broke to replace anything at this stage. my PC is only 2.5years old running Pentium 4 with HT, can't believe it is happening so soon. :(
ehrm... well u do only have 512ram... but still... uTorrent shouldn't be killing ur ram on its own -.-;... I mean that's why u have uTorrent cuz it uses so little resources... and I run uTorrent all day(Ahem!)... and my HDD's fine =/ When u say ur computer restarts with uTorrent up... is it downloading at that point? cuz then it really could be a HDD failing(Regardless of uTorrent)... Hard Drives fail with random life spans... I've had one that's been running for 5 years... and one that's quit on me after 6 months =/
I personally havent seen a hard drive fail and just give random restarts, if a hdd is failing it usually throws in a lot of corrupted data, bad sectors and to the point of unbootable, you can always run HDD diagnostics from seagate, WD, etc (just download from their websites) to see if your hdd is the problem
ye i agree with dim8sun. i mean i've only had one comp where the hdd has actually broken and when that happened, i had problems booting it up and for it to load windows and when i tried to reinstall the os it just wouldn't work. it seems to me that this could be a ram problem or some sort of software hogging the ram. but then again even if software hogs the ram, the computer will just slow down. so it could be something with the ram. try unplugging the ram and replugging it to see if it helps. if it doesn't check once ur comp has restarted turn the pc off, and check if the ram is the area which is overheating. if it isn't the ram then try a clean install of the os.
