I’m running Windows XP on an Alienware PC, and for the past few weeks it’s been restarting without prompt or error message at seemingly random intervals. The behavior began when I was playing Hellgate, which I’ve since uninstalled and reinstalled, but in the last two weeks it’s taken to occurring when I’m browsing online or pretty much playing any game.
Essentially, whenever this happens the whole system will simply shut off and restart, without any freeze or error message preceding the event. Whenever the computer boots back up it gives me the “The System Has Recovered From A Serious Error” message, but I’ve never been able to find a pattern or specific behavior that triggers the restarting.
I’m assuming it’s a problem with my memory, but I was wondering if there were any diagnostics I could use to narrow the problem down without taking the whole PC in to be examined?
(Oh, if it’s relevant I should note that I use water cooling with a small fan, but since the computer has run great for the 2 years I’ve owned it, I’m assuming it isn’t a problem with overheating.)
If Windows is claiming there’s a problem, it probably knows a bit about what it is. Whatever it knows will be recorded in the Event Log in Control Panel -> Administration. Check that out and see where it gets you.
Because anything that worked for 2 years can never ever then break down? I would say cooling in general is your #1 suspect; check all fans and fan vents for dust; I would imagine Alienware give you access to the thermometers for CPU and video temperatures, but if not check them with Speedfan .
That aside it could be almost anything on your system board, including memory and CPU. It’s worth reseating every pluggable component.
Thanks for the quick replies! I’ll check the temperature now, and take a whack at dusting and re-seating everything tomorrow (it’s really annoying to open this particular case, so I wanna wait for the daylight).
I’m checking my event logs, and it’s kind of weird: it recorded one instance of a system error that I suspect was a restart, and a bunch of application errors (mainly Firefox), but it never records errors for any of the other programs that I’ve gotten restarts with.
RE: Quartz, I haven’t changed the water out… I’ll see about doing that tomorrow as well.
Whoa, it looks like the cooling system might be the culprit after all: SpeedFan reports that my GPU is at 66C and the core is at 74C, and since both of those readouts have the little flame icon next to them I’m assuming that is somewhat suboptimal.
I’m using a Koolance system, so since I’m pretty technologically incompetent I’ll probably just buy FluidXP or whatever is appropriate.
On that topic, could someone give me an idea of how involved refilling the reservoir generally is? I’m using a “TC LCS single processor liquid cooling system”
Omi no Kami may not have got much out of your advice, but thanks Nanoda. I’m having the same trouble and your advice allowed me to track down the cause. Cheers!
Yes!! Even though the problem seems to be cooling-related, I didn’t know about the event log, so chances are I’ll get a huge amount of mileage out of your advice when future bugs pop up.
Got you beat! Thanks to this thread, I downloaded SpeedFan because I was having the same problem. I discovered that my CPU was at 171F/77C :eek: but a little cleaning later and it’s down to 118F/47C.
Yes!!! I haven’t updated because sleep and my poor judgment interrupted, the latter in a shape that quite suspiciously resembled a introductory Sanskrit class that meets for six hours a day, five days a week, and attempts to cram two years worth of material into eight weeks. ( :smack: . Note to self: “no” means “NO!” when it occurs in the form of your adviser saying “I don’t think taking Intensive Sanskrit for fun is a very good idea”.)
Anyway, I think the shutdowns are definitely cooling related because last night, after reading everyone’s advice, I executed the time-honored tradition of turning my computer off, unplugging it, and blowing into the fan grill really, really hard. Doing so dislodged a heap of dust and several fedoras, and dropped my comp down to 70C from 77C. I would’ve opened the case right there and done a proper job of cleaning, but whoever assembled my tower used an electric screwdriver to tighten the screw that keeps the case closed when it isn’t in use, so I need to go out and get a hammer- cough a better screwdriver sometime today.