PC Randomly Resets for no reason

[dws]

I have an AMD athalon 500 MHZ, 128 meg ram, and an nVidia 16 mb video card. Every once in a while it resets for no reason. It gives no error messages just starts rebooting. I've heard that this may be a fan, or overheating problem, but I've checked that and the fan is running, and I installed an extra case fan and it still is doing it. It seams to do it more often when I am doing things with more graphics, like games or scanning. But it does it with no pattern of what programs I am running. Any sugestions.

 

[compnut24]

this has happened to me as well, however, my problem was with my RAM. Not an easy fix, next week, i am going to send mine back to the company i bought it from and have them exchange it for another stick. so... i dont know what your problem could be, but i found the answer to mine...

 

[dws]

I don't think that is the problem I have a couple sticks in use already. I'll pull them each out one at a time and see how it does though.

 

[mmcgurty]

What OS are you running dws? My friend just upgraded to a MSI 266FSB motherboard and 1.4GHz AMD Thunderbird, he also had this problem. Turned out it was his soundcard and Windows 2000 crazy PCI IRQ addressing with ACPI. SoundBlaster Live! cards (all models) are notorious for causing problems with AMD products, escpecially the Athlon, Duron, and Thunderbirds. I am sure that when everything shares the same IRQ with Windows 2000 ACPI it doesn't help. Turtle Beach and Philips both provide excellent alterantives if not better to the SB Live! cards.

It could be overheating, it could be RAM, but from what it sounds like your problem is with IRQ's, ACPI, or SB Live!

Also, what motherboard do you have? If you have a VIA chipset you need to get the VIA 4-in-1 driver updates, plus BIOS fixed for the mobo (VIA chipsets often had wierd settings in the BIOS from manufacturer's, which later had to be changed for stability), and also the AGP updates.

There are tons of things to check out, but these are some answers.