Old Computer, locking up and restarting without notice
MatthewHSE
Status: Contributor
Joined: 20 Jul 2004
Posts: 122
Location: Central Illinois, typically glued to a computer screen
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We've got a fairly old computer that's been giving us some problems lately. I don't have any idea what parts are inside, except that they're AMD products. The motherboard is about four years old and the other parts (processor, memory, etc) are about two or three years old.

The computer is really pretty fast, and provides good performance. But, a few times per day, it simply will lock up or in some cases restart without warning and with no apparent reason.

We're running pretty basic software applications on this machine. MS Office products, FireFox browser, and not much else.

I've reinstalled Windows 2000 on this computer three times, and it's always been stable and reliable except for the problems mentioned above.

So I was just wondering, what kind of things could be causing these problems? Power supply would be an obvious solution for the restarting, but what about the lock-ups? I've heard it could be the mobo or the memory going bad, but are there any other possible solutions?
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Bad Memory I think
jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
Posts: 594
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My experience with sudden restarts has been bad memory. This doesn't mean necessarily memory that is failing, it means low quality memory. I had this happen on a windows xp box I got for someone, unknown to me the builder had used generic cheapo memory, and when the users switched users, which floods the memory with all the settings for the current user, then loads the new user (fast user switching in XP), the system would just reboot.

When I opened the box up I discovered that cheap memory sticks had been used, oddly those used micron chips, but a no name board and circuitry. I replaced the memory with some crucial.com memory, and the problem vanished.

That was when I decided to never buy cheap memory again.

If you pull the memory out and it's not a major reputable brand that would be my first suspicion. After that it could be weird power supplies, but I don't see that if you are getting a sudden reboot.

It can also be mismatched memory, or mismatched memory speeds, for example pc 100 and pc 133, or pc 133 from two different manufacturors.

If none of these apply, it probably is not the memory, but you never know. Sudden reboots are pretty serious indicators of some real hardware problem, unless you have a trojan or something running, which I doubt.

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I don't have any idea what parts are inside, except that they're AMD products


There's a great little utility program that gives you a read out of your system hardware, called belarc advisor. When you run that on a pc it gives you a readout of all installed hardware and software, pretty nice, not perfect, but useful.
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