Almost constant unwanted reboots with oldish PC

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Glad to see you got it sorted. You got away with it this time! It's quite remarkable the difference in weight between something decent and something crap. When I started overclocking I had a generic featherweight PSU, who's fans started to die. Replacing with a 480w Tagan showed me the error of my ways.

The PSU is the most important component of a PC. As soon as I saw your "case with generic 500w PSU", alarm bells rang. To others lurking/reading, don't ever skimp on the PSU. A branded and certified unit that has had good reviews is well worth the money, peace of mind and lack of hassle/troubleshooting. You don't have to spend megabucks or go with ludicrously high wattage PSUs either.

Jonnyguru is a good site that tests PSUs thoroughly.

Yeah, I won't skimp on PSUs any more. I don't see the point of spending many hundreds on a build only to put it all at risk with a shoddy PSU. Granted I had a cheap PSU in this pre-built PC, but I only considered it a temporary PC and have been careful to keep dual backups of all important data. I don't really consider the CX-500 to be a very good PSU either, but it's been sitting on a shelf (never opened/unpacked) gathering dust for years, and I'm sure it's not as terrible as the win power that it replaced, so I don't mind taking a small risk with it, although I think I'll probably replace it with a better PSU in 1-2 years.

I've had a PSU go "bang" before. Scared the crap out of me, but thankfully didn't damage anything! So yeah, no more skimping on PSUs for me.

Have not checked Jonnyguru yet, but heard the name mentioned. Instead, I've just been using this list to pick PSUs recently: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/...tier-list.html

24 hrs now without unwanted reboots, but I did have a break that long before whilst the problem was not sorted, so will give it a bit longer before I am 100% sure the problem is solved, but it's looking like it is.

Just want to say thanks once again to everyone here who took the time to post advice, especially DBarber who has stuck out the whole thread!

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Coming up to 3 days without a problem now, so I'm fairly confident the PSU was the cause. I'm just glad it didn't turn out to be malware!