As stable as a one legged horse …

[Zebedee]

Over the past couple week or so, my PC in the house has turned into a pain in the arse.

For no good reason is keeps shutting down at random. At times, it can be happily left on over night, and at other times is goes t!ts up every five minutes.

Any suggestions where I should start with the diagnostics … ???

It’s an AMD 2600, 512mb RAM running XP home, and nothing has been added of removed recently.

Any suggestions?

Ta

 

[Fanum]

Could be heat build up.......take the lid off and make sure the GPU and CPU fans are all working, and blow off any fluff around chips/cards/memory etc.....

You might also have a heat monitor in the system........you'll either find in in a windows app probably still on the install cd, or via dos, or in the bios....this might well prvide a clue.

The other likely thing would be a faulty ram chip.......do a google search for ram checking programmes ..there are some that test them in detail using software....that might turn something up.

Lastly, while you're inside the box, take a peek around for one of these....if you find one,you're fekked

 

[Frisky]

John,is that the nice new one thats crashing? Pipes and radiators no problem but PCs I haven't a clue.You could try Big Bad Ben, he is a pc whizz!
Cheers Dave

 

[Zebedee]

...take the lid off and make sure the GPU and CPU fans are all working, and blow off any fluff around chips/cards/memory etc.....

Cheers Boss

Just finished spring cleaning inside the box of tricks, and things seem to be much happier now.

Ta

 

[cookie]

if it's not heat, it could be the BLASTER worm.

in which case, you've 'bin a very naughty boy & not downloaded all the updates

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

you need to run ad-aware AND spybot AND a full system virus check.

mine got caught the other day - left it on too long and the AVG was a couple of days out of date and it starts turning itself off.

 

[Zebedee]

Cheers for the concerns guys,

I did try running ad-aware and Norton before the spring clean but the machine kept falling over, which was making me more than slightly concerned.

However, when I ran ad-aware and Norton after the spring clean, they only turned up a couple of uninvited guests, and none of them would have accounted for the temperamental nature of the beast.

Thanks for the concern though