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Random rebooting
mookaloid - 7/9/05 at 07:14 PM

My Brother in Law's PC keeps rebooting itself at random times

it can sometimes several attempts to boot up then it can reboot itself at any time thereafter.

Is this likely to be a hardware fault?

He has antivirus software which is up to date and it hasn't detected anything out of the ordinary.

Any suggestions appreciated

Cheers

Mark

Arthur Dent - 7/9/05 at 07:24 PM

might be the power supply. Can you borrow one out of another machine?

Rek - 7/9/05 at 08:04 PM

Check out the seating of all hardware one the Motherboard. Ive had a problem with random rebooting cased by the AGP card being gradually wiggled out of the socket by the weight of the Cable that caused a similar thing..

britishtrident - 7/9/05 at 08:49 PM

Also check the cooling fans in addition there are a couple of virus/trojans/worms that will do this

Hellfire - 7/9/05 at 09:02 PM

Doesn't MSblaster virus do this?

planetester - 7/9/05 at 09:19 PM

Mine did this, I tracked it down to bad capacitors on the motherboard, Go to http://badcaps.net/ apparently there are millions of motherboards out there with the dodgy capacitors, you can spot them because they are bulging at the top, I got 9 new ones from rs & all has been ok since

Dale - 8/9/05 at 12:32 AM

Just finished 2 weeksago putting 10 new caps on the motherboard of my wifes pc. It was rebooting continously - started out simply enough but got progressivly worse.- - look at the bigger 1500uf caps ont the board- usually with a x on the top of them- they should have flat tops , if they are bumped on the top and maybe the x spread a bit - the caps are toast. With her new caps the pc has been on for 2 weeks continously with no rebooting.
Dale

britishtrident - 8/9/05 at 07:41 AM

If a motherboard gets to the stage of needing new capacitors bin it

planetester - 9/9/05 at 10:54 PM

Dont bin it, bet you will need a new chip & memory because you wont be able to buy a modern board that compatable so it will cost at least £100.
get the soldering iron out

Hellfire - 11/9/05 at 07:55 PM

quote:
Originally posted by britishtrident
If a motherboard gets to the stage of needing new capacitors bin it


If it's doing this - I agree. It'll prolly be old hat and need updating - use the problem as an opportunity to upgrade!

mookaloid - 11/9/05 at 09:20 PM

Update:

Brother in law vacuumed all the fluff out of it and reseated all the memory and PCI cards and Graphics card etc.

Seems a lot better now.

Thanks for the suggestions guys

Cheers

Mark