Pc Shuts Down All By Itself

[AnneJay]

Hello, have been having problems with my 1.2 GHz Athlon, (40G drive, 256MB ram OS: XP Pro) for a little while now. Have had to reformat many times due corrupt files ect. Lately, the computer just turns off and reboots all by itself.. no warnings, no anything. Could it be a hardware problem?

The power supply has been suggested to me, it looks to be about 250W. Am running two hard drives (a 40 and a 60), a burner and CDrom.

Any other suggestions?

[Cactus]

Does it shutdown and restart, or does it just restart?

[areia]

I put my bet on the power supply, can you borrow a more powerfull one and try for a couple of days?

[AnneJay]

Cactus: it shuts down like someone shut off the power and then it reboots itself.

Areia: Locally I can buy a 300W power supply for about $30 so could probably just try installing a new one. However, have not done this before but have installed HD, CD R/W etc., so the questions is: Is it difficult to replace the power supply?

[richardc2000]

As you are just replacing one - try here
_http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/hardware/m40e/m40e-hwguide/html/power-maintain4.html

I am sure you can do it.

[Cactus]

It's not very likely that it is a hadware problem: If the box does a normal shutdown it's probably shutware related, or the poweroff buttun is faulty and make contact itself.

It won't be a thermal problem either; the box would then shutdown but not restart.

Set your CMOS so that hitting the poweroff button will only shutdown your box if it's pressed for 4 seconds (be aware, this means a powercut, no normal shutdown) and see if the problem still exists. If so, I'm pretty sure it's software related.

The PSU can't be at fault (at least not likely) since it can't give Winodws a shutdown command.

Edit: Typos!!!

Quote:

It's now very likely

should of course be

Quote:

It's not very likely

[Bads]

Mine is starting by itself

I turn the power off when I go to sleep and the PC start by itself a couple of hours later

I think this is an option in the bios ?

[Cactus]

Could be Bads, is it turning on every night at the same time? Then it is.

Two possible things (I can think of) could be wrong:

In you BIOS could be it could be set that your box shut powerup at a given time, or, you box could be setup to auto-powerup after a powerout.

Both options are often found in the Boot or Power option part of your BIOS.

[lickablepig]

@AnneJay
Ok I'll bite...
Depending on ur level of puter savy i'm betting on this cause it's the easiest & most overlooked.
XP has an option to "restart" the computer when it thinks it's going to be damaging itself. So we want to stop that feature for now to see if that's the problem. Go to a clear spot on ur desktop, rightclick on "My Computer, hit the "Advanced" tab under the sub catagory "Startup and Recovery" then hit "settings"...
from there under "System failure" uncheck (if it's checked) "Automatically restart"... Hope it helps!

[Bads]

I will check this Cactus

The next time I reboot my PC and let you know after