PC constantly restarting?

[artek]

About two years ago I had my friend build me a computer and it was really good. I had no problems with it at all. Until a couple of months ago I started noticing what I now know to be artifacting.

I asked my friend what he thought it was and he explained that it was the video card. So we take it out clean up my computer (dust etc.) and notice a thick film of dust coating the video card. We take out this dust and try it out on his computer. It still artifacted. He tried to see whether or not the fan was working or if it was overheating. The fan worked properly.

Then when I put it back in my PC, it started bugging out and restarting and random times of usage. Sometimes it restarted upon booting into windows, sometimes after regular browsing, sometimes during a youtube video. Just anytime. Then me and him swapped video cards and it ran smooth for a couple of hours, until in the middle of testing out Oblivion, the game just started terminating and going right back to windows, and other times, the computer restarts. I have no friggin clue what to do, seeing as I really don't want to waste and unnecessary money.

If anyone can help, I'd really appreciate it.

 

[coalfire]

Start by changing the recovery settings to disable automatic rebooting:

1.Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.

2.Click the Advanced tab.

3.Under Startup and Recovery, click Settings to open the Startup and Recovery dialog box.

4.Clear the Automatically restart check box, and click OK the necessary number of times.

5.Restart your computer for the settings to take effect.

Then make it crash again and write down the error code (from the Blue screen) to post here then hopefully someone can tell you what it means (esp as it crashed with a differant graphics card in too)

 

[CCT]

I have seen threads where the gpu cooling duct (the thing on a card that the fan blows air through) was actually plugged with dust/hair/crud.

They had to take the ductwork/shroud right off and clean out the channel.

 

[artek]

ok so i just induced the problem without auto-restart on and i got that blue screen. it said a bunch of stuff about if i have new hardware installed i should check for updates or remove it entirely.

As for as error codes go there were only two things that i could see to write down.

the top said " DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL"

and then at the bottom it said:

***STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000000 , 0x00000002 , 0x00000000 , 0x0000000)

then it went on to say something about begging to dump physical memory and then completed memory dump. I hope this is the error stuff you guys were referring to.

 

[coalfire]

try looking here http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm and find the D1 stop error (if you use firefox press ctrl + f then type D1) something there should help.

Worth making sure you have the most uptodate drivers and also running memtest to check you're memory

 

[artek]

well i looked around that link you gave me, and all signs and symptoms point to this being a problem with my RAM. So I looked around and I found a program that everyone recommends to check it out called memtest86. so i download the iso to make the boot disc, but now, pardon my extreme ignorance, but what program would let me mount an iso image onto a cd? once again, forgive my blatant retardation.

 

[CCT]

How to:

https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic62524.html