[mechanickeith]

For some reason my computer will just shut off!!! It will automatically go into restart/reboot & come right back on, This usually happens right in the middle of watching a 8-10 min video. twice tonight, right in the middle of the car chase in the movie Bullit it happened. It has also occured while surfing the web & during sending Email's. Any ideas/ thoughts on what it is & how to fix it??????

Keith

[Tone]

Aw man, that's an AWESOME car chase!

Sorry though...don't know how to help you. =/

[65gto69]

Originally Posted by mechanickeith

For some reason my computer will just shut off!!! It will automatically go into restart/reboot & come right back on, This usually happens right in the middle of watching a 8-10 min video. twice tonight, right in the middle of the car chase in the movie Bullit it happened. It has also occured while surfing the web & during sending Email's. Any ideas/ thoughts on what it is & how to fix it??????

Keith

Keith,

It is either spyware, virus, or you are running out of resources (i.e. memory, cpu usage)

Make sure you anti-virus is up to date and run a system scan. Get a spyware progam if you don't have one already and run that (I use spybot & adaware). Runc check disk to check your hard drive for bad sectors, than run defrag. Do check disk first than defrag when performing these 2 tasks.

When finished with all that, if you still have problems, hit the control-alt-del buttons after booted and select performance tab in the pop up, than run your movie or whatever causes the reboot and check your performance monitor to see if your cpu or memory or both are spiking at this point. If so you need more computer or less programs running in the background.

Mark

[dm_fan]

I had a similar situation about 4 years ago. Had bought a new Dell computer and about 3 months after getting it, it started shutting itself off at seemingly random intervals. Got dell tech to come out and check it out and just as he was guessing it was just a bad motherboard and ordering me a new one, he took a closer look at the CPU. The fan wasn't clamped down correctly and so it wasn't cooling the CPU correctly. So apparently the CPU was overheating but none of the overheating alarms were being tripped.

That may not be your problem but it's worth a quick look, just in case.

Steve

[LPete]

My guess is that it's a hardware problem. Make sure all the fans are working (including the one in the power supply), and take out the memory and reinstall it.

You could try taking the case off and pointing a fan at the computer, and see if that fixes it.

[Cat Power]

My computer was doing the exact same thing a month ago.

Turns out it was a bad power supply. I replaced the 150 watt power supply with a 300 watt and fixed the problem!

If you have multiple hard drives then I'd bet money that this is your problem.

Good luck!