Why does my computer sometimes restart itself? While playing computer games suddenly ' tak! ' it just restart itself like that. Few minutes or few hours later and ' tak! ' it restart itself again. Why is that? This is getting a bit annoying.

It might be worth downloading and running a few super pi tests to determine just how stable your system is (run say a 32M test and see what happens).

Instability can be caused by a variety of factors, the most obvious ones being heat, lack of voltage, or an inadequat power supply.

Have you been overclocking your pc? Has this happened since the start, or has it only recently happened?

There are a few possibilities, it could be that your case is running too hot under stress, or that your PSU is a bit shaky, or your hard drive is dying. If you have been overclocking then downloaded 3d mark 01 and run it for a few hours. Also run Prime95.

I never overclock my computer. Heck I don't even know what overclock means. :D

I can turn on my computer 24/7 and had no problem.

However if I play computer games ( yes this thing always happen when I play computer games ). It will restart itself. very annoying.

Hmm, if it's in games then it looks like it might be your graphics card. Do you know which model you have?

Here's a couple of things to try:

-update your drivers
-disable agp fast writes from the BIOS. You should be able to access the BIOS before windows starts loading by pressing F1, F2 or Del (varies from board to board)

I still wouldn't rule out heat or PSU issues though. There are so many variables that could be causing this!

I think it could be an overheating problem possibly. To discriminate between a GPU problem and an overheating problem try this...

1) Download Prime95 and run the torture test for 24-48 hours. This will bump your temperatures up, and give your pc a hammering. If it has no errors and your computer doesnt reboot...

2) Download 3D Mark 05 and this will thrash your graphics card.

Try updating the drivers first I suppose. But if either of those two programs make your computer reboot (esp. Prime95) I would be guessing PSU. How many fans does your computer have?

That's exactly the problem what kept bugging me last year, in the end i needed to replace the mainboard. It took the repairdude somewhat 3 months to figure it out though. :rolleyes: And when i got it back, it took less than 2 months until the whole ritual started all over again.

Do a virus check?

I did the superpi thing. It run prefectly in all test except for the 32M test. anything wrong?

ATI Radeon 8500 128mb ( I bought this card specially for Morrowind )

I already download the thing however I don't seem to know how to actually run it. Currently i'm running memtest and so far until now no error pops up.

The PSU is 4 years old ( used since the computer is bought ). I have 4 fans, 1 blowing into my grahpic card, 1 attach to the casing, 1 blowing the hd, 1 blowing the cpu. The graphic card itself got it's own little fan.

I've been very tempted to do a hd reformat and reinstall everything. Would this solve anything?

[ 05-19-2005, 01:25 PM: Message edited by: Kakero ]