What's wrong with my PC?

Horlock

Looking for advice on what might be wrong with my PC.

The symptoms are that it boots up. Boots into Windows 7 no problem. Then randomly resets the power - ie black screen and windows starts to boot up again (saying a problem - do I want to continue - I say yes etc) it starts.

The problem started a few days ago, then it was booting after about 3/4 of work - this morning this dropped to only 30 mins. Now it reboots without even giving me long enough to login and copy files off.

What have I tried to do to fix it?

I ran speccy, which claimed all temperatures running about 30 degrees

I've used a different power cable.
I've used a different PSU.
I've used a different graphics card.
I've removed one stick of ddr3 ram, and then removed the other on separate occasions.

Each time (apart from occasional warnings about changed hardware etc) I get exactly the same senario.

I've just removed the hard disk and put it into a different PC, and it is running windows perfectly.

The good news is that I still have my data in tact at least.

The bad news I don't know what could be wrong. Do Motherboards or processors sometimes just become tempremental by themselves?

Anyone have any good ideas. I don't really want to bin this computer if I can help it. It has a decent spec.

Thanks for all suggestions.

John_Gray

After all that internal work you've done, I assume that the inside (especially the fans) are dust and fluff-free?

All I can suggest is to disconnect and reconnect each connector and card, and interchange the RAM sticks.

AshleyPomeroy

Horlock wrote: »

I ran speccy, which claimed all temperatures running about 30 degrees

That would have been my first suggestion, but you're tried that. As a rule of thumb, if the failure has a temporal component it's generally temperature-related.

It could be as simple as the hard drive cable being a little bit loose; try opening up the case and pushing all the cables in firmly. While you're at it, blow out as much dust as possible.

An intermittent motherboard fault might be tricky to fix, because if you replace the motherboard there's a possibility that Windows will deactivate itself.

wongataa

I recently had exactly the same issue. I strongly suspect it was the motherboard but the reboot cycle didn't really allow a lot of time for troubleshooting. I bought a new board and everything now works fine.

Any computer component, including motherboards, can start to fail.

Quiet_Spark

As above, you have changed everything bar the CPU and motherboard, and the motherboard is the most likely suspect based on your fault description.

Horlock

Thanks everyone, I guess that is what I feared - it does look pretty clean inside, but some compressed air can only help. I'll try doing all the cables once again, just in case. If not I guess I have to decide between binning or replacing the Motherboard - I don't really need the PC which is why forking out £80 ish for a new motherboard might be wasteful.

Thanks again.