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