random rebooting

[$chlitz]

as of late, my machine has been randomly rebooting. it's starting to get quite annoying. i can't seem to pin it down to one application, and i haven't been running anything new since before this problem started to occur. my first thoughts are heat or power problems. i've got an athlon 1.2ghz running winXP on a ecs K7S5A board, with 512mb of crucial DDR 2100 ram and radeon7500. the machine runs 24/7, and it's been almost three years since it was built. i've replaced a power supply once already, but that's the only problems i've ever encountered with this system. the current power supply is a 350w compusa model...i know, i know, i should really have a better one in there. if it turns out to be the power supply i'll get a decent one this time. i frequently run various anti-spyware software and i have av software running, so i'm pretty sure my machine is clean. cpu temp hovers around 53c, case temp is usually around 26c. is that hot? from what i've read it's within the acceptable range for an athlon, but a little on the hot side. another possibility is that my cpu fan is dying. it's spinning around 2650 rpm, i'm not sure if that's a little low or not but it has been making a bit more noise lately....bearings shot? usually it'll just reboot out of the blue, but this morning i awoke to my machine being completely shut down. i hit the power switch and nothing happened. i pulled the power cable from the power supply and plugged it back in, and it booted right up. ??? is my crap-tastic power supply taking a dump on me? any other things i should check? thanks in advance...

edit: oh yeah, just thought i should mention that i don't do any gaming or run any 3D applications, mostly just web/email/music...so nothing that's really system intensive...

[EzyStvy]

Follow the first link for turning off the auto reboot function. It will probably result in getting BSOD which will help you track down the problem.

Introduction to Stop Errors

"Stop errors in a nutshell are errors that are serious enough to cause Windows to stop. They are similar to the blue screen errors that were present on Windows 9x, however there is no option to try and resume the session in a Windows NT Stop Error (Windows 2000 and all XP members included)."

Continued:

http://mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/bsod.php



Go here to search for the error message:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...&ln=EN-US&FR=0

[$chlitz]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy Follow the first link for turning off the auto reboot function. It will probably result in getting BSOD which will help you track down the problem.

yeah, i already did that last night, and then this morning the machine was completely shut down (first time it ever did that, usually it just reboots). this solidifies my hunch that it is a power supply issue. thanks for the input, though. any ideas as to why the power switch did not work until i removed/replaced the power cord? i'm hoping it's something as simple as the power supply...

sometimes when it reboots on its own i get an error saying windows has recovered from a serious error...this probably only shows up maybe 1 out of 4 reboots...

[flanzig1]

The turn on circuit in the PSU is probably not working correctly. When you unplug the wall power, the caps discharge allowing the electronics go to a default state.