PC restarting on it's own.

Capacitors of death.... ?

Google badcaps and see if your board has any ?

 

One of the PCs is restarting every hour or so. The check disk utility
can't find anything and it's not a virus.

Any pointers?

 

Blimey! If it's that I'll be better off just binning the fucking thing
surely.

 

Overheating?

 

Good point. The fans are working but it's quite dusty. I'll whip the
cover off and Dyson its guts.

 

IN what way does it restart? Just reboot suddenly? Give a message
from the system for a minute and then reboot?

 

Dodgy power supply.

 

Heather just told me it give the 'Windows has encountereda serious
error, do you want to send a report'

Handy if she'd told me that earlier.

Sounds like I need to repair XP

 

If its an old peice of shit then yes !
It could be anything causing it though.
Its worth a lid off clean up. (Observing Anti_Static Procedures).
Start with pulling all the Mainboard power connectors out and refitting them
a few times to clean up any tarnishing.
Vacuum the psu and other bits to remove as much fluff and dust as you can.
Check for badcaps.
Check all cards are seated correctly, sometimes worth pulling them and
cleaning the edge connectors with one of those mildly abrasive ink erasers.
Check your memory is seated OK.
Is the heatsink "**** Me Ouch!" to the touch ?
If it is then as Tim suggests you may have thermal issues.

 

Ahh, just seen below its *not* actually restarting !

 

Doesn't dust conduct electricity? Could be that... yes.

 

Cane scribbled on the back of a napkin:

Check if it's overheating. Sounds likely to me if it does it on a
regular basis.

 

It might be a good idea to start the computer in Safe Mode do a virus
check, then do a SpyBot & AdAware sweep to see if that finds anything.

 

The message <>

Could be troughs in your leccy supply - are you on a UPS?

 

This is not a good idea. If they've been gold flashed then the flashing
will be removed soon enough and then you end up with bare copper which
tarnishes faster.

Sure it will fix a dodgy connection if there was a bit of muck on the
edge connector but it will cause problems in the long term; which isn't
the sort of thing that will bother a service engineer.

 

More like dodgy owner

 

I bet you have.

Try re-seating the memory.

 

Well, back in the days of cirrus logic we cleaned around 20,000 PCI cards
this way after the fingers were contaminated in a dodgy PCB wash.
From my experience you'd have to rub a long time to remove the gold, this
was backed up by analysis under a microscope and thickness measurements.
Obv if you rub hard for 15 mins you're going to do some damage, but common
sense should take over first.

 

Do you mean take the RAM sticks out and put them back again?

 

In my experience (from SIM Cards) where crap customer care advise was
given by Orange "Clean the SIM with an ink eraser" it resulted in some
SIMs coming back with the gold flashing rubbed off. Then again, I only
saw the results and not the process which caused the results IYSWIM.