Random Shutdown - please help

Hello,

My computer appears to be shutting down by itself and I need your help to find out why.

It's done it twice in the last 12 hours, the only things running on it either time were Azureus and Firefox.

It is stable in Orthos for a good few hours, haven't done it over night yet though.

In event viewer, it says "the shutdown was unexpected" and has a code 6008.

I have turned off auto shutdown, but the second time it happened I was there, and literally it just rebooted itself for no apparent reason.

Anyway, any help would be much appreciated.

Tim

First thoughts would be a full virus and antispyware scan.

Yes sir :)

Youve already done that?

think it was more of a..

SIR YES SIR!! and hes getting on with it..

That how it was in my head anyway lol

Quote:

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Originally Posted by timtim86

Hello,

My computer appears to be shutting down by itself and I need your help to find out why.

It's done it twice in the last 12 hours, the only things running on it either time were Azureus and Firefox.

It is stable in Orthos for a good few hours, haven't done it over night yet though.

In event viewer, it says "the shutdown was unexpected" and has a code 6008.

I have turned off auto shutdown, but the second time it happened I was there, and literally it just rebooted itself for no apparent reason.

Anyway, any help would be much appreciated.

Tim

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What are the temps like?

staffsMike, you hit the nail on the head...

Just finished the virus scan, no threats found, but apparently user32.dll had to be changed, not really sure what that's about.

Temps for the CPU are 45 & 39 on each of the cores. GFX is about 55, but that's okay as it's in a SFF and right up against another PCI card.

Just a thought - I recently replaced the NB stock fan with a Zalman passive thing, could that be causing it? There doesn't seem to be any awful temps in speedfan, nothing above 50, but that said I'm not really sure of what the different values relate to...

So, does that help? If you're stumped, can you please say so? just so I don't start getting antsy. Thanks guys.

We need to work out the crash conditions a bit better really.

From the information provided it seems that network activity is related.. so maybe try reinstalling LAN/wireless drivers? I kind of say that because my LAN port has gone really flaky recently, and disabling it fixed some stability problems.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kalniel

We need to work out the crash conditions a bit better really.

From the information provided it seems that network activity is related.. so maybe try reinstalling LAN/wireless drivers? I kind of say that because my LAN port has gone really flaky recently, and disabling it fixed some stability problems.

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Hmm okay, thanks for that.

Like i said, the only things running at the time were Firefox, Azureus, and Vista Sidebar, so i think you could be right. Netgear wireless (I'm using WG111v2 USB adapter) drivers are a bit rubbish anyway I find, so i'll try reinstalling them.

Is there anything else I could tell you that'd help figure out what the problem is?

Thanks for the responses :)

My first thoughts are:

1) Temperatures
2) Power supply

First off, have you got something that can put your PC to full load to test the CPU temperature? If its an Intel CPU, you can download Intel Thermal Analysis Tool (Intel TAT), and then use that to push the CPU to full load and see what the temps go up to. You can also use speed fan to monitor the motherboard/chipset temperature, and you can also monitor your hard disks in there if they are S.M.A.R.T.

Secondly, what is your power supply? Power supplys (PSU) lose some of their strength over the years, especially if you are running them 24/7 for a long time. So if your PSU was only just big enough to cope with your PC originally, it may start struggling if your PC is getting old, and that could cause shut downs.

Other than that, its hard to think what could be happening. A fresh install of Windows would tell you for sure, whether its a hardware or software fault I suppose. Because if you did that and the computer stopped restarting itself, then you would know something had screwed up your Windows. If it still restarted, then it would be almost certain a hardware problem.

Azureus is more power hungry than some people may think by the way. It uses a lot of ram, and a lot of CPU power, and also uses your hard disk. So that program alone can be enough to restart a computer with temperature problems (or a power shortage).

Only other thing I can think of, is that maybe the PC has been knocked? Either way, a loose component could cause havoc. I once had video problems that I spent a week trying to figure out... Eventually I took the case off and tried pressing the card into the slot, and to my surprise, it slotted in a bit further. So either I didn't push it in all the way when I first built the PC, or it worked its way loose somehow.

It does seem like overheating...... a good move to help check would be a re-format and fresh install. A real pain I know.

Make sure if you do a re-install of windows, you backup anything you need. I had to do this a couple of years ago, and because I only had 1 hard disk at the time (and little money), I just bought a writeable DVD drive, and I backed up my stuff onto DVD-RW's.

You can even back up your Internet Explorer Favorites.

Once all that is backed up, re-installing windows and copying your stuff back across isn't much of a big deal. It would be worth it too, to know for sure if it was a Windows problem, or a hardware problem.

I am sorry~~~