I've installed a Thermal Take Silent Tower CPU cooler recently on a P4 3.2, I have two 80mm 21db fans fitted and the CPU tempreture is normally around 45C to 50C.

My PC keeps rebooting when I use certain programmes and I think this might be caused by the CPU overheating or not enough cooling in my case.

Can someone please tell me if I have the right setup and if the CPU tempreture is causing the PC to reboot.

Also, is the above tempreture normal for a Pentium 4 3.2?


Thank you.

The Prescotts run very hot. Have you tried a program like Motherboard Monitor? It will display the processor and case temp in the system tray. But you may just have a bad driver or corrupt system file. Check the Event Viewer in Administrative Tools in Control Panel.

Hi, I've checked the event viewer and I can't identifiy if it's a bad driver or a currupt system file.

There are several error's on applicatoin and system. On the system I some errors with source:
DCOM
Service Control Manager

On the application the source is:
Application hang

Can these errors be the reason for the PC rebooting, if thats the case, can you please tell me how I can fix them.

Also, how or where can I get the right drivers for my PC and is the tempreture normal if it's around 40-50c.


Thanks for your advice.

Thats a normal temperature. What video card and motherboard do you have? A bad driver can cause the problems you're having.

I have the following parts:

Gigabyte S478 GA-8IG1000 Pro-G motherboard
Radeon 9200 128MB DDR AGP VIVO graphics Card
Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160GB
P4 3.2 1MB S478 800FSB
Corsair 2x512MB XMS3200, Dual Channel
Pioneer DVR108
Mitsumi 7in1 Media Drive

Did these problems start after you changed the processor fan? Take off the heatsink and make sure its making contact with the processor. Did you use thel paste or a thermal pad? You cna get motherboard drivers at Intel.com.

I had these problems before I installed the CPU fan and I used Thermal Paste. I thought after installing the CPU cooler, it would change the CPU temp so that the PC won't reboot durring video encoding and etc.

I have installed the updated driver for the Pioneer DVD drive and I am now trying to install the Graphics card driver which I think might be causing the problem.

Hello Kam.

I am assuming that you are using Xp

Do the following. Right click my computer and select properties, then the advanced tab, and under system startup and recovery click settings, and uncheck the box that says automatically restart, also set the write debugging information to none.

Now when your system crashes instead of it rebooting you should receive an error message telling you why it has crashed.

Pay particular attention to any drivers identified in the stop message.

Regards Howard

. :grinthumb

Which version of the Catalyst drivers are you using? I had alot of problems with 4.11.

I'm using XP pro with service pack 2

I was using catalyst version 4.3 (didn't realise this version was that old) which came with the box and I recently installed version 4.9

After downloading and installing this version via the SapphireTech website, i'm having more problems. The PC would re-start after installation as normal and when it re-starts the hardware update wizard would appear requesting to instal the software. It then tells me the hardware was not installed and it could not find the necessary software. I then get a pop message at the bottom left saying the hardware was not installed properly. On the Device manager, I've got 2 yellow question marks under Other Devices and Unknown Device.

I don't know what to do now. I tried encoding again and the whole system would just freeze after 5 mins. I checked on the Event Viewer under system and it's got source "service control manager", when I checked the properties, it states " The IMAPI CD-Burning COM service entered the stopped state"

There's also a error with source " service control manager" and it states:
The ATI WDM specialized MVD Codec service failed to start due to the following error: the service cannot be started, either becouse it is disabled or becouse it has no enabled devices associated with it.

Can someone please help me to try and fix these problems.

Try this. Download Catalyst 4.12 from ATI.com. Go into Add/Remove programs and remove anything that says ATI. Then do a search for any files related to ATI and delete them. Then restart the computer. When Windows starts installing the card cancel it. Then manually install the new Catalyst drivers. If that doesnt work you may have to do a clean install of Windows. Once you install and uninstall video drivers they tend to make a mess of the OS.

I've removed anything that says ATI and installed the new Catalyst 4.12 from ATI.com.

I also done what Howard suggested and unchecked the box that says "Automatically restart" and set the the write debugging information to none.

My system still reboots automatically (while I'm using DVD shrink) and I don't get any error messages telling me why it has crashed.

When I checked the event viewer again it stated the same thing under service control manager " The IMAPI CD-Burning COM service entered the stopped state "

I can't think of a reason why it would mention the above message. I installed the new driver for my DVD drive from Pioneer recently as well and this problem occured before that.

I'm thinking if it has anything to do with the CPU tempreture in a way that if it gets too hot, the system reboots automatically. Can this actually happen and can I change anything within the system or via CMOS set-up.

Download Motherboard Monitor. It will show you the processor temp while you're using the computer.

Is your computer by any chance an eMachine? My dad got one for me not realizing its the worst computer you can get. If you do, you have the same problem as me. The computer keeps resetting randomly, and sometimes it wont turn on and you have to switch some hardware-like remove the modem, unplug a cd drive, or ive had to pop out the grahics card and jam it back in before it checks if its there. I noticed that the heatsink was running a lot cooler than my other computer's heatsinks, so i switched the thermal compound, and now the heatsink is much warmer. I thought I had fixed it, but just today it reset again. When i looked in the application log, i saw that it had 3 errors from 3 of my 4 virtual drives, and right before that, an "imapi cd burning com service" had stopped. Well whatever, dont buy emachines. :dead:
By the way-I use a Nvidia mx440 gpu, not ati

Just had to reply to this one so everyone has a good path to follow if they are running into this crazy error: "The IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service service entered the stopped state" on XP SP2.

The computer I am working on simply crashed when this service stoped. I had tried disabling the service but it didn't stop the crashing problem. This thread put me on the right path for fixing the problem. I ended up going to this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPI. Then downloaded the Adaptec's ASPI driver for Windows, currently at version 4.71.2. When I ran the version checker it said some of my files were corrupt or reverted to an older version. I reinstalled the files for XP then everything was problem free.

Hope this helps those who hit this issue.

With my PC, I can measure temp with either a probe which displays on an analog gage on the case or with ASUS software provided with the motherboard. How are you measuring CPU temp? Does anyone know how accurate the software method is? The probe generally measures the temp on the external surface of the heat sink.