Strange sounds, and now random restarts. I think it's related.

[Thalin]

OK guys, this should be the correct place to post this.

Recently I have been hearing strange sounds inside my PC. It sounds like a fan, kind of slowing down and almost churning, before sounding like starting up again and the sound goes. It's not a clicking or anything like that. I removed my case of my PC to hope to find where the sound was coming from, and then it stopped happening, and it dosn't happen as much now. It either happens a few times in a short space of time, or not at all for a long time, so it's rather annoying sitting there waiting for it to happen, only to find it dosn't.

However, I have now had 2 random restarts in the space of a couple of days, and they don't happen when my PCs just left running, but when i'm about to do something, like just after clicking on a web link, and just now when I opened a folder. I get no error message although there are logs in the Windows folder which say the time it happened but I have no idea what log is best to look at, as some arn't very helpful.

Any ideas what this could be?

I'm quite sure the sounds and restarts are related because I never got any random restarts before the sound started.



update:



I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but an Asus Probe the Power fan is unticked and when I tick it is flashes the message - power fan below threshold, and it flashes 0 where it's meant to say it's status. I can feel 'slight' air coming from the fan if I put my hand behind it though...

 

[zephead]

the odds are good that your power supply is going bad.

follow:
start>control panel>system>advanced>startup and recovery settings
unckeck the box that reads 'automatically restart under the 'system failure' pane. now when you have trouble windows will attempt to display a bsod. if the power supply skips a beat, however, the system will lose power and be forced to restart.

 

[engineer2001]

The power supply fan can only be monitored if it has a fan lead that comes out and connectes to the motherboard. My ASUS Probe says my PSU fan is at 0 RPM too, and it's fine.

Do you have an AMD processor? If so, do you have "Cool and Quiet" installed and turned on? If so, the fan slowing down and speeding up could be due to the Cool and Quiet (that's what it does - slow down the heatsink fan when the processor is cool to keep it quieter and speed it up as the processor heats up).

The random restarts could be due to any of a number of things, including bad RAM, OS errors (XP issues a STOP error code and restarts upon critical errors), or a faulty/underpowered PSU, as zephead said. If you have XP, you can go to the "System" area in control panel, the "Advanced" tab, and click the settings button under "Startup and Recovery." You can then uncheck the "Restart automatically" option, and you will get to see a blue screen with any STOP errors XP generates instead of a magic restart. If your PSU gets overloaded with too many total watts or too many amps on a single rail (3.3v, 5v, 12v, etc.), it will usually cause the system to hang/freeze, though. Restarts are usually due to bad RAM or bad RAM timings, in my experience. Have you run memtest on the system?

http://www.memtest86.com

It could also be due to hard drive errors or lost file fragments causing critical processes to die. Try running error checking and defragmentation on the hard drive.