Computer restarting randomly. Please Help!

[Murd0c]

My pc was a Hp pavilion a37n with a 3.0GHz pentium 4 hyper threaded. sata hard drives with 1TB of Hard space (from 3 different drives) a pci express 16x video card (radeon x700) and 2.5 gigs of sd ram (2 are crucial and the .5 came with the pc).

Okay this is how things progressed I am the director/editor of a indy film and I have about 270 gigs of footage on my pc for the project. I have most of this in premiere to edit and it was all running fine. Then about a week ago my computer restarted randomly and I assumed I was over working the cpu or it was a heat issue. So I ran premiere again with the ctrl+alt+dlt graph showing me how much cpu and ram I am using.(sorry, I don't know its technical name) It showed that the computer was running around 50-70% cpu while editing. So a few days later it happened again and last night it happened 3 times. and two of the times I had no programs open I was just packing up footage for fear of losing a year of my work.

So my computer restarts even when nothings running. I've checked for adware, spyware, virus's, reg problems, I defrag a few times a year and keep my computer relatively clean.

I also upgraded from a 250 watt psu to a 500 psu because of the 3 sata drives I have. So what could it be please help. I have a deadline to fill and I don't want to lose any work.

thanks to anyone who can help.

oh and heres where i plug the project so you know its real.

www.dickmontana.com

www.virb.com/dickmontana

 

[Rik]

The first thing i would try if i were you would be to remove the 512 stick of ram just incase it is mismatched compared to the other 2.

 

[dgard821]

One thing to look at in BIOS is the option for error handling - likely it is set to "Restart on all errors" and you should change it to "Halt on all errors"

Have you booted to safe mode to eliminate driver issues?

(What PCI graphics card do you have? NVidia's can cause this - if you see an error similar to "nv4_disp stuck in an infinite loop" you'll need to completely uninstall and reinstall the drivers)

 

[AlbertLionheart]

I suppose it might be the new PSU if all else is eliminated. Try putting the old one back to see?

 

[mailpup]

Similar to what rik suggested try removing all but one RAM module. See if any of the modules are causing the problem by trying each one in turn, one at a time. I had a recent random restarting problem (no BSOD or error messages) and it turned out to be one bad RAM module.

BTW, you are wise to back up your project data. Because of the nature of your project, you should back up frequently.