Crashes

possibly your power supply.

would be cheaper to buy a new case with power supply than to buy a new power supply alone.

Check motherboard requirements and buy a case that has power supply designed for your motherboard


Also, you may want to go to pcpitstop.com and run tests to see what they find and reccommend.

 

These are the symptoms that are typical of one of your fans dying. There are usually two fans, one to keep air circulating in the case, and one to cool the CPU itself. If either of these burn out (which they all do eventually), the computer will work fine for awhile, then overheat and shut itself down, reboot, freeze, etc.

It's easy to check, open up the case, locate the 2 fans, turn the PC on and see if the fans fire up. If not, it's usually just a matter of unscrewing it and disconnecting the power cable and replacing.

 

Sounds like one of the above off the top, but also:

Do you get any error messages?

Have you tried booting into safe mode immediately after it croaks?

Have you installed any hardware/software that would correspond to the beginning of your porblems?

If all else fails, you might try a restore to a date before your problems began.

If really all else fails find someone with a boat and sell them a high tech anchor :thumbs:

 

Before you do anything drastic, let's try this...

Defrag your computer. If you don't know how, you probably never have. Ask if you don't.

Scan for adware/spyware. I recommend Ad Aware and Spybot (both updated, of course) to find and eradicate most of it.

Scan for viuses. Use your own AV, and then use an online scanner (TrendMicro offers a good online scanner).

Update your system drivers. Motherboard (chipset, sound, everything), graphics, modem (if you have one).

Update Windows completely.

Kill all unneeded programs. Use MSCONFIG, only check your AV/firewall/what you have to have.

As a semi-last resort, you can do a repair of Windows. Boot from your Windows CD. choose the first option, F8 to accept the agreement, "R" to Repair (don't hit Enter or you will erase everything). You will have to have your Windows serial number, but it is a painless process.

 

I was given an older computer awhile back and I saw dust balls hanging from the holes in the back. I pulled the side cover, dust fell out like a full closet bursting forth when the door was opened. I could not believe that much dirt could gather without being a garden :laugh:

 

Heh heh... dust can cause a lot of trouble, that's for sure.

 

Now Trotter.... you should like the guy in India.... < -- running and hiding -->

Jamie

 

Yeah, you better hide...