PC randomly shutting down and restarting

[SirDarknight]

Believe me, it ain't as simple as the title suggests.

 

I live in Bangladesh and my friend has this really old PC. The original spec was: Asus G31M mobo, Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2 RAM (yep!). She called me the other day and told me that her PC just shut down randomly during work and refusing to boot at all (Restarts after the BIOS screen or after the Windows loading screen). Now, this is pretty common issue, right? So, I brought her PC to my home, cleaned the RAMs and put them back on and the PC turned on normally. I gave it a clean installation of Windows and other apps and sent it back to her. She used it for about an hour before the problem started occurring again. I gave her the instructions on how to pull out the RAMs, PSU cables and put them back on again. She did that, PC started again and the problem started happening after a while again. Being it such an old machine, I didn't have any spare parts to swap and check what's causing the issue, so I took it to the local service shop and they said that the chipset(mobo) was overheating a lot and should be changed. They didn't have any G31 board so they gave us a G41M and a new 4GB DDR3 RAM. Came home, turned the PC on, used it for about 5-6hrs before the shutdowns and restarts started happening again! I suspected it was a PSU issue, so I got her a new PSU too. This time, the PC ran for a whole night before the problem started occurring again in the morning!

 

Note: I did some googling and someone suggested that a peripheral might be "shorting" and causing such issues. So, I tested it by disconnecting the peripherals one by one and turning on the PC but the problem occurred nonetheless.

Note2: When the PC runs normally (without restarting), I ran AIDA64 test and the temps never crossed 65C which should be pretty normal and the PC didn't crash under the stress tests either.

 

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated guys! Thank you.

[mahyar]

10 minutes ago, SirDarknight said:

Believe me, it ain't as simple as the title suggests.

 

I live in Bangladesh and my friend has this really old PC. The original spec was: Asus G31M mobo, Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2 RAM (yep!). She called me the other day and told me that her PC just shut down randomly during work and refusing to boot at all (Restarts after the BIOS screen or after the Windows loading screen). Now, this is pretty common issue, right? So, I brought her PC to my home, cleaned the RAMs and put them back on and the PC turned on normally. I gave it a clean installation of Windows and other apps and sent it back to her. She used it for about an hour before the problem started occurring again. I gave her the instructions on how to pull out the RAMs, PSU cables and put them back on again. She did that, PC started again and the problem started happening after a while again. Being it such an old machine, I didn't have any spare parts to swap and check what's causing the issue, so I took it to the local service shop and they said that the chipset(mobo) was overheating a lot and should be changed. They didn't have any G31 board so they gave us a G41M and a new 4GB DDR3 RAM. Came home, turned the PC on, used it for about 5-6hrs before the shutdowns and restarts started happening again! I suspected it was a PSU issue, so I got her a new PSU too. This time, the PC ran for a whole night before the problem started occurring again in the morning!

 

Note: I did some googling and someone suggested that a peripheral might be "shorting" and causing such issues. So, I tested it by disconnecting the peripherals one by one and turning on the PC but the problem occurred nonetheless.

Note2: When the PC runs normally (without restarting), I ran AIDA64 test and the temps never crossed 65C which should be pretty normal and the PC didn't crash under the stress tests either.

 

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated guys! Thank you.

you changed all but not the cpu? when pc is crushing are fan at full load?

[Kisai]

Time how long it takes. A consistent amount of time when it's warm means it's thermal.

 

Unfortunately there's not really much you can do without swapping parts. A more typical answer would be that the CPU memory controller is the fault, but usually that doesn't result in a shutdown, only thermals do.

[SirDarknight]

2 minutes ago, mahyar said:

you changed all but not the cpu? when pc is crushing are fan at full load?

Not really, no. It just randomly shuts down. As I mentioned, I did run AIDA64 stress tests at 100% CPU load. If it was a thermal/CPU issues, shouldn't it have shut down then?

 

[mahyar]

2 minutes ago, SirDarknight said:

Not really, no. It just randomly shuts down. As I mentioned, I did run AIDA64 stress tests at 100% CPU load. If it was a thermal/CPU issues, shouldn't it have shut down then?

 

yes it will.

btw when it is shutted down if you press power button anything happens? like fans starting?

[SirDarknight]

2 minutes ago, mahyar said:

yes it will.

btw when it is shutted down if you press power button anything happens? like fans starting?

Yep. After it shuts down, if I press the power button, it starts up, fans starts spinning and shows the BIOS flash and restarts again. Sometimes it goes to Windows loading screen and then restarts.

[mahyar]

likely a cpu problem