No idea why PC freezes/crashes

[Chrushev]

Ok first of..

WinXP
AMD 2600+
1GB PC2700
6800GT

as you can see. an old comp (i built it 4 years ago if not more)...

the issue:

2 types:

Type 1: Id be doing something and all of a sudden it restarts.. now its no ordinary restart. Once it starts booting back up it hangs on the screen before the BIOS MOBO logo. Black screen.. and i have to turn it off physically then power it back on for it to boot up.

Type 2: It will just freeze. No looping sound or anything just bam im looking at a screenshot... here hitting reset button works, but sometimes it will hang on that same black screen as in type 1.

This randomly started happening.

now im pretty certain its not CPU overheat proble, since my processor when overheats makes a high pitch noise and turns off the comp.. never freeze or reset.

Gfx card tems are sitting below 60celsius as well.

Ive ran Microsoft's System Memory analysis thing and it found no problems with my RAM.

Ive also ran Hard Disk checker and that found no issues either (took like 30 hours to scan 160GB)...

also another interesting thing. I had this (or very similar) happen to me like a month ago.. and after a few resets etc it stopped... now its been a month and its doing it again... wtf?

Since its not my Heat/ram or HD... im thinking maybe PSU... but then why would it work fine and give issues once in a blue moon?...

are there any analysis programs that can pinpoint the issue? im sick of it... oh and i tried reformatting when this happened a month ago and that didnt help.. so its not software issue i dont think.. unless its like WinXP and some driver issue.

Also when I go to Event Viewer it shows no errors Ive tried to check at different times after resttting the log too... when this was happening a month ago it was giving me some errors in the log.. but not this time.

Oh and lastly.. since most of the time all I do is play WOW this mostly happens when playing wow. but has also happened when just having firefox open... or when i leave my PC running nothing overnight. and also when i was typing shit on MSoffice...

so it doesnt seem like an issue with some certain software.

maybe its a bad cluster on HD and its trying to access it and does that and the proggie i used didnt detect the bad cluster ? what does this sound like to you guys?

 

[foz]

Looks like you have checked all the right things. I think it really could be the power supply. Some times PSUs cause all sorts of weird errors when they are going bad and don't just stop working from one day to the next. Try switching it out with a known good PSU. If you do decide to replace it, get the highest wattage you can afford so you can use it when you upgrade - you can never have too much power. (at least something in the 500 to 600 watt range)