Hi, new to this board and throw myself at your mercy.

I have ongoing problems i'll start at the beginning t see if it has any bearing. First my hard drive stopped working so I replaced it (myself, first time fiddling with the guts of a machine). All was fine for a few months then I started to find that my machine would suddenly restart itself and I would get the message 'boot from cd and press any key' ctrl alt delete wouldn't boot up windows again. So I changed the hard drive again (these are second hand hard drives) and formatted. A week later i'm getting the same problem. The computer is on a while and then reboots it'self and I get the boot from cd message again. But if I leave the pc say overnight it boots up normally again.

Should I just bite the bullet and buy a brand new hard drive and format again?
Could it be raulty Ram? I have two sticks in making 1GB - if so how could I check its the memory?
Could it be something like my disc drive? I know that it gets quite hot if I use it for a while.
Or something like a cable fault? or anything else i'm not thinking of?

I'm planning on opening it up today and having a look and seeing if its a dust problem blocking something up but before I do that is there anything usefull that you could tell me that would help me with my problem? I really want to sort it out myself, it costs a fortune to put in the shop to test.

Much appreciated

Plug your computer into another socket on the wall.
I'll bet on it being the surge protector or battery backup surge protector.
If you try a different surge protector and it doesn't happen then I'd think that is the problem.

This post has been edited by cmpm: Apr 24 2008, 05:32 AM

Bad computer memory is one of the three main reasons for random system failures.. the other two are heat (usually

caused by fans or heatsinks being blocked with dust) or power issues...

first...lets make sure its not your memory going bad...
get memtest + here....
the lowdown is here..

if you have a floppy drive you can get the 6th one down ...set the bios to boot from the floppy drive A:

first...then the cd drive then the Hard drive C:
or you can get the 2nd one down and burn the ISO file to a cd and then boot it from the cd drive...

if you don't have a burning program that will burn .ISO files ...
go here and get burncdcc ..a small FAST no frills iso

burning program...

NOTE...do not put a blank cd in until burncdcc opens the tray for you
1. Start BurnCDCC
2. Browse to the ISO file you want to burn on cd/dvd ....in this case its memtest86.iso
3. Select the ISO file
4. click on Start

make sure in the bios the cd drive is the first boot device....put the cd in the cd drive..boot your computer....


let memtest run for at least 2 hours...if it starts showing any errors during that time then you will have

to replace the RAM...no errors after 2 hours just press Esc to end the tests and we will try some other

tests


go here and get everest home...install and

launch it...click the + by computer...click on sensor...get a screenshot and post it so I can check your temps and

voltages...

This post has been edited by happyrck: Apr 24 2008, 07:01 AM