Computer restarts while watching movie, or doing nothing

[Jaf]

Frustrating!! Help

I've just bought a new pc and I've found a problem. At first my pc used to restart unexpectedly twice a day. This used to happen while watching a dvd or playing a game. I looked the problem up on the internet, i found people with the same problem. They said update all of your drivers especially your graphics card drivers.

I updated my drivers and checked my ram with memtest86 v3, as some people said your ram may be bad, it came back with no probs. I've bin on windows update and service packed up with the latest updates. I went into my computer selected the advanced tab went into the system failure section turned off Automatic Restart, just to make sure it wasn't that what was causing it. It didn't crash for a week.

But now its started crashing again frequently. When im doing anything, surfing the net, listening to music, watching DVD's or playing games. I've virus checked my pc for any viruses that could restart your pc but I have no infections.

Here are my MAIN PC specs:

AMD AthlonXP 2700+
512 MB DDR RAM (384MB + 128MB SHARED GRAPHICS)
GEFORCE4 MX IGP (SHARED MEMORY)
WINXP HOME EDITION

I really hope someone can help me with this, and i would be very grateful for it.

 

[poertner_1274]

It could be a heat issue. Do you have any system fans or case fans to exhaust the heat? Check some of the temperatures and post back. What have you installed recently? New hardware, or software that could cause this?


Also for future reference please make your thread title a little more informative as the title you gave is very vague and people will often skip over it because they don't know what it is about.

 

[Jaf]

I've managed to download some software that measures the Hard Drive Temp. When the pc has been on a while the temp reaches the 40 degrees celcius mark:

Max Temp: 43 Degrees Celcius
Min Temp: 27 Degrees Celcius

Are these temps okay??

 

[SNGX1275]

yeh those temps are fine

 

[Rick]

How about your power supply? Any reason to suspect it may be underpowered or not working properly?

 

[Jaf]

How do you check your power supply. Would you have to take the lid of your pc and check it inside. Im not too good with things inside the PC.

 

[Steg]

hard drive temps?
what about CPU/System temps
download motherboardmoniter and ask that what your other temps are

Steg

 

[poertner_1274]

Yes, that is what I was trying to get at was CPU not harddrive. If the CPU is overheating everything should act up, but if the HDD is overheating, chances are, you won't see that much difference.

 

[Jaf]

Sorry for just giving you the hard drive temp.

The system temperature is 39 degrees celcius and the CPU temperature is 41 degrees celcius. Im sure these temps are fine.

Also the other day i was thinking what might be causing the pc to restart unexpectedly. So the other day I went into the bios on system startup, and set all the settings to default. After I'd done this I noticed that 32MB of RAM was allocated to the integrated graphics board, whereas before 128MB of RAM was allocated to the integrated graphics board. The people at the factory must have set it to 128mb at first. Is this a reason why the pc is restarting when playing a game because too much RAM is allocated to the integrated graphics board. Or has this nothing to do with the problem. I must say since I've changed this setting it hasn't crashed yet. And its been four days since i changed the setting, usually the pc restarts twcie daily.