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Desktop issue

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Hello,
My dell desktop is like 6yrs old. I have updated the ram to 3gb, have a dvd rom and dvdrw, running windows xp 3ghz pent 4. I got a new psu about 3yrs ago and at that time i went with a 450w not sure brand and the cpu stayed on all the time i did have the montier off at 5mins and standby at 15min. I am running a raedon 9500pro 128mb graphic card. Now to my issue.
I burn movies on my computer and verious other things like surfing net and what not now while burning a cd or dvd sys will restart no error msg, also ive been surfing the net and the sys with just reboot without error msg, and finly ive had the sys in the middle of the net just shut the moniter off and the green moniter light turns orange as if its in standby mode but i was in the middle of useing the computer and the only way to get it back on is to restart the computer also ive been getting the screen freezing and goin black for a couple sec then a vpu recover error msg comes up. Now is this a graphic card issue with shutting the moniter off, rebooting and the vpu errors or is this a psu overheating issue? ive checked all fans are running inside the sys im not getting errors so i have no idea what it is. The only thing i think is since i left this on for like 3months at a time and just shut it off for a day or two and then on for a couple months that it just wore the psu out cause i know there rated for a certain amount of hrs.

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I would certainly start with the PSU. It only has to be erratic in its voltage and all sorts of problems will manifest.

Make sure all your Cards are seated properly in the Motherboard. Time and heat has a way of making cards distort.

Make sure you have all your fans free of dust especially on the edges of the blades. If the blades are furred up they simply wont move air in the manner required.
Power supply Master

Sounds like a dying video card to me and or heat issues.
Also a Pentium 4 isn't exactly capable of doing multitasking as you're describing.
it's a single core cpu.
Download some monitoring tools like HWmonitor
and GPU-Z to get an idea of temps.

thanks for the reply yeah before i posted this i went int there with a can of air and a vacuum and sucked what lil dust their was out. ive taked the card out and put in made sure all connects are nice and snug. Yeah i dont have money to blow on a psu and then it turn out to be the graphic card so im really would like to narrow it down before i spend the money.

Its a dual core processor, i never had this problem but maybe 3-4mon ago this all started and has gotten worse and happening more often.

Im looking at getting a corsair 650tx 80plus PSU to replace it from what i read cant go wrong with this PSU?
i dont do alot of gaming but sometimes ill get on an old mmo and on those notes what kinda graphic card would be nice for under $100? was lookin at something like 256mb memory card. ive done some looking around but they all look the same and a million and one are available so any input will be helpful for me to make a dicision.

You can get the PSU checked for faults before you buy another one. I am not so certain it is an over heating issue. If all your fans are going as they should then there is no reason to believe that it is running hotter than it has in the past. The other suspect would have to be the Motherboard. The two biggest offenders are PSU and Motherboard. Another thing to consider would be the HDD. I had a Raptor Gen 1 that passed all its tests yet managed to hide some nasty BIOS fault. The PC would hang at random. Turns out the PSU was faulty as well. That was a total drama when it came to diagnosing the fault. The PSU got picked up on a test and the HDD came to light when the RAID controller finally detected an issue with the HDD in question. Get the PSU tested and eliminate it one way or the other.
Power supply Master

P4 processors are single core. however, some have HyperThreading (HT), and have 2 threads, which will show up in task manager as two cores. IF its dualcore, then its probably a Pentium D, which is a lousy dualcore based on the NetBurst architecture like the Pentium 4 (P4)
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