My wife's PC has been randomly shutting down for probably over a year now and I'm fed up with it, plus hearing her yell down at me from our bedroom every time it does it. I recently changed her ram (she only had 4gb running win 10 oops) and now has 8gb, hardly ideal but she only uses Facebook, email, you tube etc. I also swapped out her mouse as it suddenly stopped working and i thought maybe that was causing the lock ups and shut downs and everything has been fine for about 3 weeks.... until tonight.. when i hear the dreaded GARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. How can i fault find this?
If you haven't already, have a butcher's at the event log. Intermittent issues are a pain but that might be a good place to start. Is there anything it coincides with?
Presumably nothing is overheating? As @kenco_uk says, any error codes? These are the most annoying type of problem.
Yes my wife using her PC Wife problems are the most annoying, agreed, she certainly overheats when it happens I'll post up the event logs tomorrow and no nothing is too hot that I can see.
Does it Bluescreen? Is the System Failure setting set to Bluescreen or Automatically restart (I don't know where these are in Windows 10 as I still access it through the old System Settings option).
My usual is the big hammer to crack a nut approach when faced with this situation. A compete disassembly, physical rebuild new paste etc and a new install of Windows, software etc
Does it have a SSD or HDD? If it is the later lock-ups could imply bad sectors/read errors. How you run drive drive diagnostics?
I've found nirsoft's suite to help sometimes in these instances - the "Bluescreen Help Identifier" or whatever it's called at least points you in the right direction. Let me grab a link...I'll be back EDIT: This is the main page and this is the BSOD one. It does help narrow things down somewhat. Think we managed to identify a PSU culprit using it. With regard to your previous solutions, I have heard that having somebody else provide additional RAM in the bedroom can indeed help, but there are associated trust issues.
How old is the hardware? Had similar problem with old PSU, it would reboot randomly withing a month from last reboot, sometimes it would last couple days, other times weeks. Basically anything with electrolytic caps and older than couple years can be a culprit, and its right on impossible to diagnose without throwing parts at it.
