PC switches off suddenly

[harry smit]

!!! SOLVED !!!

I replaced the 235 W Power Supply which was mounted standard in the PC cabinet by a:
"Flower Power 420 watt ATX powersupply dual fan"
(Intel P4 and AMD Athlon suited) for about 94 Euro.

Browsing the web on this subject showed that more
vague problems could be caused by just an El Cheapo power supply. Even the quality of a PSU can be determined by just measuring the weight...

Now I can start installing Pro Tools under Windows-XP-Pro on my Dual Celeron 400MHz machine.

Thanx everybody for the input.

Harry

[Roy Howell]

Man, Harry...just scanning this thread...the last post before you solved this tonight, was January 29th?...hehe...and this is July 4th. I guess it's been five months since all this started?

Well, I'm just glad you got it solved... [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

~Roy

[harry smit]

R,

OK. You're right.
The huge delay is because it happened now and then. I kept on working with the PC but now, summertime, the PSU got killed due to high environment temperature...

I just wanted the discussion board to give the
solution also.
That is why we have this DUC isn't it?
Problems and possible solutions.

Harry

[Bastiaan]

Well.....if hot weather is giving you problems.....you shouldnt have had problems the last few days..... [img]images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

(its like autumn in the Netherlands.....)

[harry smit]

the hot weather just gave the final stroke...

[Rano]

wow this has happened to me too! The system randomly reboots without warning.. but the problem IS directly related to PT LE since I had no problems for some time (5 months) that I had uninstalled the software from that computer.. the computer shuts off when running other programs as well and not just LE, but it happens when I have LE installed..
will try the fixes suggested

[Stone Knife]

In some instances, I think it's possibly a combination of the 001 requiring more power than a typical computer card, and the quality of the power being fed to the machine. Cheapo PS's have little or no capacitors to deal with sudden power demands or power drops in your wall current... and the power supplied (here anyway) fluctuates quite a bit...

And there are some machines with software conflicts in their video drivers or perhaps ACPI hassles.

I wish we could say it's just one thing that will fix this...

For me, the answer was a herkin' Enermax 450 watt 2-fan monster I learned about thanks to advice from the DUC's here- not a single S.R. in 2 1/2 weeks!

[JMS40]

Originally posted by Stone Knife:
In some instances, I think it's possibly a combination of the 001 requiring more power than a typical computer card, and the quality of the power being fed to the machine. !

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I agree Stone.
In fact, I truly believe that the majority of spontaneious reboot problems are power supply related.
I would put mismatched ram a distant second.
BTW Harry, don't mean to rain on your parade but I suspect you're not going to be very happy with XP PT5.3 running on a Celeron 400.
You might possibly get better performance running win98 and PT 5.1.
My 2 cents.

[Okion]

Every single time I have had this problem it was never the power supply, it was one of 3 things.

1) Battery: There is a little watch type battery that keeps the stuff like the clock working while the power is off. I don't know why, but if it is dead you can get this sort of problem.

2) CPU: This si the one that hurts. This is a common symptom when you have over-heated and fried your CPU. Offten happens when you have overclocked the chip.

3) Motherboard Clock setting: If you have it set overclocked, you can run into this sort of thing. Sometimes you haven't actualy fried the CPU, you can just set the clock back to the proper setting and be fine. If not, see (2).

note (1) is the cheepest, but don't bet on it if you have done (3). (2) can happen even when you haven't overclocked.

[JMS40]

All the things on your list could produce restarts but, in my experience anyway, I couldn't call them the most common overall.... especially here on the forum.
Most have had their config's set correctly.
I still believe 001 is power hungry.

BTW, what happens when the CMOS battery goes dead is that BIOS settings are not retained at power off and must be reset with each boot.

Originally posted by Okion:
Every single time I have had this problem it was never the power supply, it was one of 3 things.

1) Battery: There is a little watch type battery that keeps the stuff like the clock working while the power is off. I don't know why, but if it is dead you can get this sort of problem.

2) CPU: This si the one that hurts. This is a common symptom when you have over-heated and fried your CPU. Offten happens when you have overclocked the chip.

3) Motherboard Clock setting: If you have it set overclocked, you can run into this sort of thing. Sometimes you haven't actualy fried the CPU, you can just set the clock back to the proper setting and be fine. If not, see (2).

note (1) is the cheepest, but don't bet on it if you have done (3). (2) can happen even when you haven't overclocked.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">