Computer woes

For the past day or two I have been experiencing some strange computer problems. My comptuer just shuts off randomly. Just like there was a power outage in my house, it just goes blank. There are no warning signs, such as slowin down of the coputer, or the sound of the hardrive starting to reboot, it just shuts off. Sometimes I can play games on it for hours with no shut down, or play games for 5 minutes and a shut down. It even shuts off when I am listening to music, or viewing webpages.

I have not added any new hardware or software in the recent past. I really have no clue what it could be. Here is an even stranger thing, to turn it on after it shuts off randomly, I have to turn off all the power leading to the computer off to get it to turn on again, only to have it reboot randomly while booting the BIOS, or booting windows, or playing solitaire.

Any suggestions before I rip it open and go through it piece by piece to try and diagnoisis it? I have alreadly opened up the case to look for any lose wires that could cause shorts, and etc.

EDIT* As far as I can tell it is not an overheating problem, all the temps stay in the normal/low range.

We have this at work a lot. Most times, some n00b got a wire placed over the CPU fan and the wire gets stuck and overheats the computer. We had one that overheated ONLY when the network card was in use. Any other processing was fine without a cooling fan, but as soon as you owuld connect to the network and start some data going through, it would just crash after 5 minutes or so. we unblocked the processor fan and poof it was okay the rest of the time.

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

That was one of my ideas, but i opened it up and saw really no lose wires near the fans. I'll take another look if the crashing happens again though.

I have been running my comptuer for an hour now with normal temps, and fan RPM's

You kids these days with your fancy "arr pee ems" and "temps."

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

Well, if the computer needs ALL power sources to be restarted before it can come back on (Does this mean you have to switch off a surge protector and turn it back on?) Could mean that your house is actually the problem.

If everything is good then all of a sudden, there's no power.

This really sounds like a surge or something. Could be in the house ... or power supply. Easy ways to check:

Put the computer on a different circuit in the home. If it still does it: you know it's the computer, I'd suggest swapping out the power supply to see if another one works.

Other than that, I have no idea. But it really sounds like a circuit is tripping or something. Or it could be something else entirely ... like terrible wiring or a failed CPU. (But that wouldn't explain intermittent usability)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

i have a related problem, my pc doenst reboot but it freezes. Mostly during games but sometimes simply in windows. When it freezes, the last miliseconds of sound keep looping. I have XP(sp2), and if i remember correctly, i didnt have this problem in win98. I ran sisoft sandra and it appears theres a small part of my ram that is corrupt. Now my question is, is this freezing due to using these bad ram clusters, or due to cpu (overheating? i never hear an alarm or something) or something else.

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These words are my diaries screaming out loud

i have a related problem, my pc doenst reboot but it freezes. Mostly during games but sometimes simply in windows. When it freezes, the last miliseconds of sound keep looping. I have XP(sp2), and if i remember correctly, i didnt have this problem in win98. I ran sisoft sandra and it appears theres a small part of my ram that is corrupt. Now my question is, is this freezing due to using these bad ram clusters, or due to cpu (overheating? i never hear an alarm or something) or something else.

Bad ram is a dangerous thing.

That could easily be the problem. If the CPU was overheating it wouldn't freeze, it'd crash. But, it could be other things too ... to be honest, you're saying "One thing is wrong, is it that thing or something else completly different" ... from your description, I would guess it's the RAM's fault. Do you have a scanner at boot?

Try to find out which stick (if there's more than one) has the bad stuff. An easy way to make sure is to check in BIOS.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

i dont think i have a scanner at bootup. i'll check it out when i've got some spare time. i think i best try out without the faulty ram stick and see if the problem remains, but then again, there are periods now when it doesnt freeze for a long time

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These words are my diaries screaming out loud

It got to the point where nothing would turn on on the mother board. Not even the LED on the mother boardto indicate power. That lead me to suspect the power supply; I was right. I opened up the power supply, and there was a diode with some cracked soder. So I guess it was making very little contact. Slowly the remaining soder probably melted away, and the thing didn't make any more contact at that point. I just re-sodered it and it seems to work now.