It sounds to me like you have a heat problem. This usually manifests itself
by the system working normally for a while and then locking or rebooting
when you put it under strain, then you reboot and it seems to be working
again. Fans are not particularly expensive, you could try upgrading your
CPU fan and/or fitting fans to the case to draw air through your system. In
extreme cases, you could even fit a graphics card fan to the chipset
heatsink on your motherboard.
It can often be caused by running components out of spec too. I had a
similar problem on a mate's PC last month. He was running win2K but
suffered lock-ups and reboots when the machine had been on for a while and
he started doing anything intensive with it (i.e. play 3d games at the
fastest possible frame rates). We tried everything, and cooling really
helped, but it turned out we were using 100Mhz memory in a 133Mhz system.
Changing the RAM solved the problem, so check that you're not running 66Mhz
memory in your 100Mhz fsb system.
I hope this helps.
Neil.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Walker [mailto:alex@x3ja.co.uk]
> Sent: 07 March 2002 16:11
> To: nottingham@lists.lug.org.uk; general@compsoc.nott.org.uk
> Subject: [nottingham] Computer troubles
>
>
> I'm having some spontaneous reboots on a desktop machine I
> built myself,
> wondering if anyone could shed any light on what they think the cause
> may be.
>
> Here's the spec:
> Chip: Duron 600
> Mobo:
> RAM: 256Meg (9 meg shared with graphics card)
> Case: Maplin 300W case
> HD: IBM Deskstar 30G
> CDROM: CREATIVECD3630E
> CDRW: Mitsumi CR-4802TE
> Floppy: Bog standard one from old computer
>
> Running Debian woody/testing.
>
> Here is what I have diagnosed so far:
> - Reboots are hard and horrible and happen under various
> kernel versions
> (tried 2.4.16,17,18 2.5.4,5,6-pre1,6-pre3) with and without power
> management support enabled.
> - Reboots occur more frequently under heavy load (was running
> distributed.net, stopping it seems to have reduced reboots, but not
> altogether. On kernel compiles it dies frequently.)
> - It has happened often at 4am, which is odd because cron runs at 6 on
> Debian (I think), but I guess it could be updatedb or something
> triggering it.
> - Sometimes when it reboots, it doesn't boot up again, but all the
> lights on the computer (CDROM, CDRW, HD, Power) flicker madly and
> there's nothing onscreen. Pulling the power cord out the
> back is the
> only way to stop this. Sometimes plugging it back in
> instantly allows
> it to boot, sometimes a couple of hours are needed.
> - Removing the CDROM, CDRW and Floppy from the IDE and power seems to
> have no reliability impacts.
> - The Deskstar has been replaced once but this time I ran badblocks on
> it before partitioning and it gave no errors, so I don't
> think that's
> the problem, and the symptoms of that were very different.
> - From lmsensors I can see that the processor is within acceptable
> limits (<35 degrees), at least under 2.4.x I can see that,
> lm sensors
> doesn't compile under 2.5.x AFAICS.
>
> I get the impression this is not a software problem, because of:
> a) The way it reboots instantly and doesn't seemed to be linked to
> crashing or anything
> b) The way that sometimes it won't even get to the BIOS.
>
> So I replaced the PSU - but to no avail - same behaviour.
>
> Has anyone had a similar experience with a computer? I guess
> it must be
> the mobo, RAM or chip that's the problem (or even the PSU still), but
> any idea which?
>
> The only option I seem to be left with is to transfer everything to
> another case and try and eliminate all the components...
> unfortunately I
> don't have too many spare computers lying around, but I could
> bastardise
> my main machine, but I don't particularly want to!
>
> Any help greatly appreciated, if you want any more info, just ask.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alex
>
> --
> ALEX|X3JA
> alex@x3ja.co.uk
> ICQ: 1523424
> MSN: x3ja@hotmail.com
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk
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