My uncles computer is restarting randomly. It's been happening for over a month and I'm trying to help him out and don't know whats going on. He tells me it just restarts randomly without warning ( no BSOD). Today, it didn't even get to windows, it just hung at the "Dell" logo screen where you can press F2 or F12 to get into bios or boot menu. Pressing those buttons didnt do anything (the keyboard is working fine, I'm typing on it now). So I checked the PSU cable, which seems to be fine, he doesn't have it up against the wall or anthing. So I swapped the ram around, hes running dual channel. I tried 1 stick of RAM only, tried both like this, then put them both back in, and I could get into windows. Then I tried downloading and running memtest, it ran for over an hour with no errors, then the computer shut down. I'm guessing it was one of those random crashes my uncle mentioned. Everything seems to be working fine except these random restarts and I'm pretty much out of ideas as to what might be wrong. Maybe the PSU is dieing and causing these random restarts or I could try reformatting, though I don't think that will fix this issue. I don't want to reformat though, he has alot of things he needs to back up if we decide to do that...anyone have any idea what might be wrong?
Back-up using external media like an USB stick or external harddrive. My uncle also has this problem. Didn't looked at it though, but maybe a bad harddrive or high temperatures?
This is what sounds to me like a failing PSU. This would explain the random restarts that you're dealing with. Its either that or the motherboard is on the fritz. If you happen to have a PSU lying around trying swapping it out if you can. Some of those Dells have some proprietary PSUs so use caution with that.
OldBuzzard hit the nail on the head its the power supply i had the same problems just last week and took me a while to sort it out coz at first i thought it was the hard drive and swapped that out and then the ram, motherboard and finally the PSU which ended up solving the problem In your case it could be one of two things the power supply (most probably) or the HDD (not likely but worth checking).
thanks for the replies everyone =] I'll ask around for a spare PSU from people I know and hope they have one D:
