So, here's the deal. I'm getting apparently random restarts. They happen regardless of the apparent load on the system, and at a frequency of about every 4 hours - although I might go for a day or two if I'm lucky. The nature of the restart is a complete instant off, followed by a reboot. There is no attempt at a bluescreen; the computer just dies. This is the case even with 'automatic restart' disabled. Quite often the restarts happen in direct response to an event such as clicking a button, or once, inserting a flash drive. The button click can be very minor - like minimising a window. At least twice it has just gone down when I've been out of the room though. I don't know if it is related or not, but the system has never been 100% reliable at booting; about 10% of the time, the boot will fail just as the screen goes black before Vista's glowing orb appears. This has been the case for months, whereas the random restarts seem more recent. No component has ever been overclocked, although the BIOS doesn't detect the correct speed for the ram, so I have set that manually. Vista 64 E6600 4gb geil 6400 4-4-4-12 Tagan 480W - 3 years old Asus P5W DH Deluxe BFG 8800 GTS 320MB OC Any bright ideas much appreciated.
Last night I had a weird turn with it - it died twice in 5 minutes, and then refused to get more than 10-15 seconds into POST until I gave it a few minutes to rest. Whilst that was going on, I pulled out three of the DIMMS and the soundcard for good measure, and it still didn't help.
Carefully look over all the RAM for blown off SMD capacitors. Sometimes memory sticks loose a few on either side and it makes the computer restart at random.
If you go into your system properties (under XP), under advanced and then startup and recovery and uncheck automatically restart (I think thats where it is) Then if you get a random restart then it should display the BSOD rather then restarting straight away. I had a very similar problem to yourself and mine was a faulty stick of RAM, but Memtesting wasn't always showing faulty sticks for some reason (I swapped them and haven't had a restart since)
Thanks for the help so far guys. I'm in the process of trialing different sticks of ram to try and spot what's wrong. No definitive answer yet. Does anyone know if this sort of behaviour could be caused by a dodgy motherboard?
Yes, it could be mobo, but that kind of fault is so hard to trace that substitution is the only answer. My bet is still PSU, have you tried another one????
I'm RMAing one that we have lying around the flat. Will probably take a week or so though, frustratingly.
