Hello all, Im new here as this being my first thread on this forum. I come with many questions and hopefully you guys can help me out as Im getting pretty desparate.
My P4 Gaming Rig has been acting up latley, heres the story: So one night i was playing BF2 just as i normally do when all of a sudden my pc restarted all on its own. I was like "Ok, maybe its just a bug". So i turned my pc on again and 5 minutes after the desktop loaded, it restarted again. I immediatly thought POWERSUPPLY was the culprit. Soooooo, now that my 480watt PSU burned out, i began to think could this be due to the new ram and GFX cards i just installed. I was convinced it was. So i bought a 550watt PSU to support the P4 2.66ghz Northwood processor, the 1GB of dual channel pc3200 RAM, and a GF-6600 256mb AGP Card, and 2 120GB IDE HDDS. I also have 2 other fans running to cool the system and a 4000rpm blower fan on the CPU heatsink. Today i installed the new power supply cleaned up the cables a bit with some cable management and installed the new fans repacing the old ones. Time for power, but when it came, the computer booted to windows xp just fine, and exactly 1.5 mins later, while on the desktop, restarts itself. It does this everytime.
This is what i went through trying to figure out what was wrong:
1. A boot virus- nope, i scanned using two different methods
2. HDD corruption, impossible both ran fine the other day
3. BIOS corruption, i really dont know how to find that out
4. CPU damage, i dont know how to find that out either
5. RAM corruption, dam once again i have no idea
6. Motherboard problems, where do i even start? The motherboard is brand new and had been working fine since January
Ok so to combat all of this madness heres what i have done do far:
1. Reformatted both drives (lost 37 GIGs of music and software in the process)
2. Ran scandisk/chkdsk on both drives and the tests were A-OK
3. Resorted to default BIOS settings
Now heres my new problem:
Everytime i try to reinstall windows, during the initial setup phase it cannot copy some files from the CD. I took the CD out and it was scuffed up a bit so im getting a new copy of WIN XP pro.
My fear is that even if i get windows installed on it, that this stupid RANDOM restarting behaviour will continue, and thats where you guys come in.
I NEED YOUR HELP!!
What should i do? Where should i start?
Thanks so much for any input you can provide for me, you are the people that know what its like to not be able to use a downed machine.
Thanks again
My P4 Gaming Rig has been acting up latley, heres the story: So one night i was playing BF2 just as i normally do when all of a sudden my pc restarted all on its own. I was like "Ok, maybe its just a bug". So i turned my pc on again and 5 minutes after the desktop loaded, it restarted again. I immediatly thought POWERSUPPLY was the culprit. Soooooo, now that my 480watt PSU burned out, i began to think could this be due to the new ram and GFX cards i just installed. I was convinced it was. So i bought a 550watt PSU to support the P4 2.66ghz Northwood processor, the 1GB of dual channel pc3200 RAM, and a GF-6600 256mb AGP Card, and 2 120GB IDE HDDS. I also have 2 other fans running to cool the system and a 4000rpm blower fan on the CPU heatsink. Today i installed the new power supply cleaned up the cables a bit with some cable management and installed the new fans repacing the old ones. Time for power, but when it came, the computer booted to windows xp just fine, and exactly 1.5 mins later, while on the desktop, restarts itself. It does this everytime.
This is what i went through trying to figure out what was wrong:
1. A boot virus- nope, i scanned using two different methods
2. HDD corruption, impossible both ran fine the other day
3. BIOS corruption, i really dont know how to find that out
4. CPU damage, i dont know how to find that out either
5. RAM corruption, dam once again i have no idea
6. Motherboard problems, where do i even start? The motherboard is brand new and had been working fine since January
Ok so to combat all of this madness heres what i have done do far:
1. Reformatted both drives (lost 37 GIGs of music and software in the process)
2. Ran scandisk/chkdsk on both drives and the tests were A-OK
3. Resorted to default BIOS settings
Now heres my new problem:
Everytime i try to reinstall windows, during the initial setup phase it cannot copy some files from the CD. I took the CD out and it was scuffed up a bit so im getting a new copy of WIN XP pro.
My fear is that even if i get windows installed on it, that this stupid RANDOM restarting behaviour will continue, and thats where you guys come in.
I NEED YOUR HELP!!
What should i do? Where should i start?
Thanks so much for any input you can provide for me, you are the people that know what its like to not be able to use a downed machine.
Thanks again
