andrewcc

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Feb 20, 2007
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Ok, so, my girlfriend's computer has been shutting itself down at random for the last 3 weeks or so. It used to be that it'd stay on for a day or two, then shut down, apparently now it takes about 5 hours. Then again, last week she said it stayed on for 2 and a half days. Since it just appeared to be turning off, I assumed "Power supply failure," especially since I knew it had a crap-tacular PSU in it from when the previous boytoy transferred it over from the original HP case.

So, today I replaced the old supply (it was ridiculous, weighed about as much as a 20oz of pop) with one from my old comp. The replacement is solid, I never had a problem with it, I just upgraded and needed more juice. Plugged it in, ran fine from the time I put it in this morning. I got a call 20 minutes ago, and the thing shut down again. At this point, I'm out of ideas, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

System Specs:
Athalon 2800+ @1.8 Ghz
512 Kb PC3200
80GB Caviar
OLD, tiny AGP Graphics card
CD Drive
Floppy Drive
4 60mm case fans

She's had parts of it for almost 5 years and got a couple things replaced 2 years ago, but it's a word processing/web browsing/emailing machine, so it doesn't work all THAT hard.

The new power supply is a 350 watt (according to the PSU calc that's more than enough) that came out of my Dell. Worked great for about 8 months, then I replaced it because I put in a new graphics board.

I know that sometimes the RAM can be a problem, but she's had this stick for 3 years and it's worked fine. Like I said, any and all help is greatly appreciated......I'll even give you credit for it instead of keeping it all for myself :wink:
 

andrewcc

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Feb 20, 2007
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Hmm.....alright, thanks mpilch, I'll get that done as soon as I can. Hopefully that'll fix things, and I won't have to come screamingback with more questions.
 

neo_weapon

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Mar 19, 2007
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it could be really anything. i had this exact same problem for the past 5 months and i finally got it fixed this weekend (haven't had time to fix it). But you definitely want to try out memtest.

Basically, when you have a problem like this, you want to do everything you can before you have to start replacing hardware. So do this:

-run memtest
-run virus scans, try different virus scans
-run hard drive diagnosis tools. check your hard drive website to see if they have any.

if all of those are running fine, now is time to start uninstalling hardware

-uninstall everything except stuff needed to run the computer adequately, i.e. mobo, psu, cpu...etc.
-now see if the computer crashes.

-if it does, you narrowed it down to the cpu, mobo and psu.

I replaced my mobo and my computer works with no random shutdown ever since.
 

andrewcc

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Feb 20, 2007
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So, the original post is from quite a while ago, but life gets in the way of fixing stuff sometimes. I finally got the chance to run Memtest on the machine, and it won't get through the entire battery of tests...typically dies sometime around test 7, which doesn't mean much, I don't think. She says that over the last 20 days there has been periods where it'll run for 30 minutes at a time, and there were a couple points where it ran for 3 days straight.

At this point, I'm assuming the memory is the culprit, but if anyone has any other recommendations, that'd be great.
 

andrewcc

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Feb 20, 2007
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So, the original post is from quite a while ago, but life gets in the way of fixing stuff sometimes. I finally got the chance to run Memtest on the machine, and it won't get through the entire battery of tests...typically dies sometime around test 7, which doesn't mean much, I don't think. She says that over the last 20 days there has been periods where it'll run for 30 minutes at a time, and there were a couple points where it ran for 3 days straight.

At this point, I'm assuming the memory is the culprit, but if anyone has any other recommendations, that'd be great.