My faithful old desk top (maybe four years old now) is preforming a warm boot two or three times a day without any input from me. Seems to do it when it is sitting idle. Anyone got an idea before I take it in for repair? Would at least be able to give the shop a little guidance on what the problem might be. I am going to buy a new one since this one is so old...but I tend to get my old computers repaired and put them in different places in the house... Also: What is the best software to use to copy my entire hard disk contents to the new computer? Thanks in advance for your ideas.
I had a Mobo with bad capacitors once that would reboot on its own. If you open the side cover and look around the cpu area you will see several capacitors in rows. They should be flat on the ends. If they are bulged any, the capacitor is bad. Any good computer shop can replace or upgrade you internals and swap/copy your hardrive. Good luck!
Same thing happened to me....I installed the latest patches required for my computer and it seemed to take care of things. I went out and bought a portable hard drive instead on any software. Paid 80 bucks for a 160G WD that can fit in your pocket and plugs in with a USB. They have 240 G ones for nearly the same price right now at Costco and they are the same size. Copy the info you want to the portable drive and then copy it to the new computer....I really only used it for My docs, videos, music, pics etc...but I did copy some software as well. Beauty of it is that you can keep it and continue to use it and even use stuff from one computer to the next. I like to use it at work too!
This is the first thing that I would do too... Bad/conflicting device drivers can cause this to happen. Also make sure that your Virus definitions are up-to-date and that you run a FULL scan. I would also run CCleaner (I think you already have that, right?), and a good Spyware cleaner, like SpyBot S&D. If it still does it, I would start to think that it might be hardware related. If the machine is 4 years old, I would consider how much it might cost to repair. It might not be worth keeping, if it costs say $250 to fix, it's time to retire it. Norton makes great software called Ghost that will make an image of your hard drive exactly as it is, and let you put that same image on another hard drive. (I wouldn't use it until you are sure what is causing the problem, because you will just move the problem with the image!) There is other software out there that will accomplish this too, but I have always used Ghost.) A portable (USB) hard drive is almost a must! As affordable as they have come, they are a very economical way to archive, store, transport and copy files from one machine to many machines. If you need specific help, you know where to find me...:grin:
You guys rock! Great input...will work on it this afternoon... Got to take some Japanese visitors to the Art Institute in Chicago...back later.
If you have some sort of screen saver that has a memory leak this could happen also... Just a thought. Did you change anything in the last couple of weeks? Have fun at the Art Institute.
I wouldn't exactly call it jealousy... Umm... what's the word?... Oh yeah! Disdain!!! :harhar::harhar:
BAAHAAHAAHAAHAAHA! That was good. Made me think of the PC/Mac commercial with the nerd and the gay guy lmao! j/k j/k :towel:
The only problem I see is non compatability or planned obsolosence of old software with new software. Download your info as soon as possible because I have been known to lose everthing like tax info for ten years. OOOPS. Shouldn't have hit delete by mistake. Hate computers for this problem. Unless your really into software you can't even diagnose.Not tryin to spend your money but just get a new computer/faster/better. Your basically forced to get a new setup.
Not ruling out electrical components, I had a corrupted Google tool bar program that reboot my PC... I noticed more when on line, but did affect it as well went not on line... keep up on your windows updates & anti virus.. Ken
Yeah, I NEVER allow any of those toolbars to be loaded on my machine, at all!!!! No exceptions... Google Toolbar, Yahoo! Toolbar, Weather Bug, etc. All of those are laden with Adware, Spyware, Viruses and junk email....
if the pc is around 4 years old, i would swap out the psu (power supply) basically you told me its recycling when its idle. that tells me that you arent running any cpu intensive operations, so the mobo and cpu possibilities are out the window. i recommend everyone with a pc 4 years old or older replace their power supply. its cheap and an easy way to gain a bit of lost performance.
Excellant answer Almost correct (Weather Bug is just that, a BUG)....except for the Google toolbar. I have beeen running Google Toolbar and Google Desktop (setup to run only in the system tray) for a long time, Google Toolbar has a far better popup blocker than the one that comes with IE and I really like the "AutoFill" feature (but I don't trust it far enough to give it credit card info). You just have to be careful how you set it up. It ONLY becomes intrusive if you check the box for the "Advanced Feature" which states: "Information about web pages you visit may be sent to Google to personalize features such as the news shown in Sidebar. Other non-personal usage data and crash reports may be sent to Google to improve Desktop. To learn more about our privacy protections, read our Privacy Policy." I really like Google Desktop, but not the stupid Google "Sidebar" which just takes up display space. You know I think it is interesting that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo, but every new Vista pc comes with Google Desktop and that stupid Google Sidebar pre-installed.
