i have a PC that i built myself, running on XP SP2, Machspeed motherboard, AMD 3000 processor, xfx video card, seems to restart randomly, for no apparent reason. I know that this a rather general question, but any ideas on why this might be happening would be most helpful :confused: :wave:

Could be a virus.............did you run a virus scan?

yes, I am currently running McAfee, webroot spysweeper, spybot search & destroy, as well as Adaware, so it may not be a virus, but i am still open to any suggestions. Thanks for your input

Might be overheat. Go buy a can of air at your local tech shack and give it a good dusting out. Dont use compressed air! That stuff will be so full of oil, dust and moisture and it'll be almost certain that you'll foul your system out.

I had an HP do the same thing. I made a power cable (from a spare) with bannana plugs tapping into one of the power lines so I could connect it to my Digital Multimeter to keep an eye on the current draw. As I suspected the draw would spike just before the comp shut down. I was told by HP (still under warranty) it sounded like a power supply problem. They replaced the computer entirely so I cannot guarantee a power supply will do it but thats where I would start. Good luck!!

I had the same thing happen to me recently with my 3 year old Gateway. I could hear whining like slowing down and speeding up. I thought it was the power supply and replaced it with no success. Turns out it was my line conditioner/surge suppressor that needed to be replaced. It was pretty old, like 10 years old. Bought a new surge protector/battery back up which solved the problem. :roll:

spontaneous restarts are most likely caused by a bad stick of ram.. most likely you have at least two sticks of ram. The first stick is fine so the pc starts fine but when your pc begins to use more ram and starts using the other ram channel, you pc restarts.

You can simply troubleshoot this by taking the 2nd ram module out. If it runs stable, (although slower) you know it's the second ram stick. You could take the good stick out and replace it with the suspected ram stick and see if you pc will even POST. Most likely it won't.

hope this helps.