Any PC gurus on here??

shazzz

Hi there
My PC has started switching itself off.
It only happens when the machine is first turned on, and nearly always at the point when the list of users is displayed during start up. Normally happens five or six times before the thing eventually stays switched on. Once it gets going, everything is fine.
Any bright ideas?
Cheers

on the road

Try here http://www.pcpitstop.com/

Or here

http://forums.pcpitstop.com/

meenaghman

IS the PC switching off or is it just the monitor ? Could be graphics card having a problem. Had some similar switching off/hanging problems recently with my PC after putting on some Windows updates.. Turned off all the pwr saving settings and its been fine since. I may need to reflash the motherboard.. alternatively I've loaded another PC here with UBUNTU linux distro and have been well impressed. This box with a 1200 mghz chip and 256M memory outperforms my other PC (3000+ with gig of mem, +512 on graphics cards). At last a version of Linux thats user friendly, with the option of learning more using the terminal and command line stuff. I used to use Unix years ago.. but have forgotten most of it... its all coming back to me now.. Where did I put my awk book... vi editor .. grep , egrep, and perl .. fantastic. ..

Big Red S

As above, check it's not just the graphics card not sending anything. Listen for fans/drive spinning, or just hit 'caps lock' and see if the light changes.
Does it do it in safe mode?

Check everything in the box is plugged in properly, and that the power cable is, too. Maybe try a different power cable and/or socket? I had a similar problem with my computer - arbitrary power cuts, and only after replacing most of the computer did I realise that It was a loose connection in the socket...

To rule out software, might be worth downloading and burning a LiveCD of some sort (any of the *buntus would be appropriate: ubuntu.com kubuntu.org, xubuntu.org, you'll want whatever the latest (non-beta) 386 version (assuming you're running Windoiws. An old mac will want PPC) is (7.04?)), and booting from it. If that works for a while, then it's probably a software fault of some sort.

This is Windows you're running, isn't it?

el_presidente

Have you tried turning it off and on again?




Oh

brasso

Could be any number of faults. What operating system are you running? how long has the fault been apparent? If recent have you done something to the computer, hardware upgrade of software installed?

shazzz

Thanks for the suggestions.
PC is running windows XP, no changes to hardware or software recently and definitely the PC turning off, not just the display.
I haven't tried safe mode - will give that a go this evening.
The IT guy at work thinks my PSU is shot (the box is around seven years old; motherboard, cpu, etc around four years old) so I'm probably gonna try replacing that with my fingers crossed.
Cheers

dave_s

Sounds like a virus/trojan of some kind.
I had one which shut my PC down each time I started up Internet Explorer a while ago.
You could download a program called HijackThis and see if you've got any registry hacks/loader going on which might be causing this and you can disable them

Otherwise if you have a backup, format your C: drive and restore the backup.
If you don't have a backup, format your C: drive and re-install XP and any programs you use then download Acronis TrueImage and get a backup sorted (takes about 20mins to totally recover your PC with Acronis)

Once you've re-installed everything, consider setting up firewall, anti-virus and trojan scanning/blocking software. There's plenty available on the web.

Clever Pun

It might well be something as simple as overheating, I had a very similar problem a while back, open the bad boy up and if you see shed loads of dust etc over the cpu fan.. clean it off and you should be back in business... should

WaterMelon

I had a similar problem a while ago and it turned out to be the CPU overheating - I stuck a new fan on (a few quid) and the problem vanished. I was warned, though, that the CPU could already've been damaged (it wasn't as it happened) but it's worth bearing in mind before you invest too much on solving the problem.