XP: Random shutdown

[Jerry Falletta]

My PC has been randomly shutting down lately (since last week); this is a complete shut down in which everything goes dead. Sometimes this happens while I am doing something, not always while on the Internet. I wonder if it could be a bad driver, although I do not recall installing anything new in the past couple of months. Virus and spyware scans come up with nothing wrong. I have checked the power supply voltages and the CPU cooling duct and fan, and all seems OK there, although I am unable to monitor any "burps" in the voltages from the PS. I have also reseated all connections to the motherboard.

The motherboard is an ASUS P4C800E with 1 GB RAM (which I also reseated). The good/bad news is that I have not seen a return of this problem since reseating everything. Maybe I am just skeptical, but I am not sure the problem is cured completely. probabl because it was so random in its "appearances".

Any ideas of anything else I should look for? Is there an easy diagnostic that would show bad drivers and/or bad components, maybe something that would run constantly to reveal very intermittent problems?

Thanks in advance.

[Kov-Ice]

My ASUS boards came with a monitoring program called ASUS Probe on the mobo CD. That has temp, fan, and voltage graphs to check for irregularities. It will run in the background and keep a history of those levels.

[Jerry Falletta]

Originally Posted by Kov-Ice My ASUS boards came with a monitoring program called ASUS Probe on the mobo CD. That has temp, fan, and voltage graphs to check for irregularities. It will run in the background and keep a history of those levels.

I looked for the CD that came with this motherboard a few years ago and was unable to find it (still sorting some things after the move to a new house), so I downloaded the ASUS Probe utility from majorgeeks.com. I ran it and the tem was up into the mid- 90's.

I opened up the PC again and looked at the CPU fan and it still looked quite clean, so I decided to disassemble the fan unit from the CPU (what better way to spend a day off?). The Arctic Silver compund was dried and flaked off, so I scrubbed the remaining porting from both surfaces. Upon removing the fan from the heat sink and holding the heat sink uo to the light, I could see no light between the fins. I vacuumed, flushed, rinsed, and dried the heat sink, and then reassembled everything (including a fresh blob of Arctic Silver). The CPU temp is now 49 degrees Celsius (the mobo temp is 30C), ad all is well.

Moral of the Story: Completely disassemble the fan and heat sink, and clean both thoroughly more often..... vacuuming and air-blowing are not enough.

Many thanks for the prompt and helpful suggestion........ I owe ya one!