PC power Switching off

For the past several months my Pc has been switching off on it's own, Sometimes it happens a few times a week and sometimes it wont do it for weeks.

If I try switching it back on after it's done this, it'll power up but I cant hear the hard drive wont spin and so the PC wont boot up, but will after I've switched it off by the button on the back of the psu.

Does anyone know what could be causing this??

It could be the cooling fan for ur processor. I had a similar issue and changed the fan.

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Could it be that your PC is overheating so it's switching itself off? How long have you had your PC for, Gaz?

It's a custom build had it about 3 years, I was thinking it could of been a heat issue but the last time it happened it had only been switched on for a couple of mins

It could be the memory.

Possibly, I did stick an extra 1gb in a while back that I rescued from a old work pc

Are you getting the blue screen error message before it shuts down? And after it fires back up, are you getting the "Windows encountered a problem, and needed to shut down" message?

Because if you are, you might be able to decipher where the problem is, from the error code, or log.

No it just cuts out, like it would if the power was cut

chances are it will be the old/new ram you put in. a damaged ram stick will cause random reboots and random off's.
the reasons could be the old rams latency and timings were to different from the original ram causing 1 of 3 possible problems.
1) 1 ram stick itself is damaged.
2) the memory controller is damaged on the motherboard (amd athlon and above wont as there mem controller is on chip and less likely to be damaged by bad timings or latency and would result in an unrecoverable cpu fail).
3) all the ram has become damaged as well as the mem controller. (intel motherboards up to core 2 duo)

how to diagnose.
getting a copy of prime 95

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Home...me95.shtml


remove all the ram and test it 1 stick at a time.
boot windows and run prime 95, and run its blend test option this will stress the ram and should cause your system to reboot, or at the least show a bad stick pretty much straight away.

if it reboots, then turn off remove the ram insert another stick and repeat. hopefully your old ram (the ram you didn't put in later) will pass at least 2-4 iterations without fail.

if it passes then you have found the problem if all the ram passes then its time to look to a pro. as you don't want to be mucking about with a live 24-70+amp psu. which other than swapping out to test another should be the limit of your testing that part.

Cheers for that