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So this is my story..

Early November '04 my PC started acting up for no appearant reason, I was probably pushing it since I had been deeply involved in an MMORPG game, which consumed a ton of my time..anyway I had this PC built to play this game since my old HP wouldnt cut it, after using this PC for about a month and a half to two months it started shutting off, the ****** thing would just flip off...it shut power off, only it still showed power as on..the moniter registered nothing, almost as if it were in sleep mode and wouldnt come out (though you could all too clearly hear the sound of the PC turning off before hand)...after checking, and re-checking my sleep mode settings dozens if not a hundred times I concluded it wasnt the issue.

So, with me not being the most knowledgable PC person I did all I could...ran AVG, scanned and defraged two or three times each though it made no difference. The PC would do this almost randomly, there seemed to be nothing obviously causing it to boot, which when it did happen I had to actually flip my surge protector on and off to even get the PC to power back up as using the reboot and shut off buttons on the tower did nothing.

Eventually I took it to my tech guy, he bumbled with it for a week or so and gave it back claiming it was fixed...though after an hour or two surfing the net it clearly wasnt, so I gave it back..this process happened about three to four more times before finally he took it, attempted to reformat the harddrive which didnt solve the problem either, he then replaced the memory,motherboard and CPU chip..which he figured did it, yet again after a short time having it back it clearly wasnt!....STILL!

Anyway, I've had it...he gave it back the last time after replacing the things listed about a week before Christmas '04, He seems to be incompitent and good at only wasting my money but I have yet to find another tech guy.

One thing I did notice is that now, after he replaced the harddrive,CPU chip and motherboard is that it doesnt do its wierd sleep-mode/shutoff thing now...it does still flip off unexpectedly but now it reboots..So evidentally he touched on the problem somewhere.

Anyway I just went back to school and I havent had time to care about getting it fixed until recently, It still shuts off when I do simple things on the net...listen to music, load a picture...randomly but still.I've also noticed that if I even try to play any type of computer game that it reboots within a minute or so (sometimes sooner)..I've asked around a few other forums and they mostly point at heat,the video card or the hardrive.

So now I have no clue what to do, maybe someone can give me some advice here.

(PC Specs)
512 MB of RAM
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 1.24 GHz
Radeon 9200 64Mb DDR
Asus A7V8X-X
Vulcano up to XP 3000+ INTELT PIII 1.13 GHz

(If I listed something useless or left something out I appologise, I really am retarded when it comes to PC hardware)

Welcome to the forums and thanks for the in depth post.?

It sounds like one of two things :
Video card
Power Supply

There isn't any specific program that we can use to test these two pieces of hardware so the best thing to do would be to try change them.
Try to run another video card in your system first and see whether the problems persist.
If so then try get hold of another power supply (maybe from a mates machine) and test to see if that makes a difference.

They do say that power supplies cause something like 70% of all computer problems. So fingers crossed.

I would also be interested to see your motherbaord/cpu temps too as these symptoms could also point to heat (as you already stated).

Grab a tool like MBM (motherboard monitor) or similar to check.

I doubt it's the video card, honestly... My guess would be that it is your processor or RAM overheating, or that your power supply is borked. I'm leaning more toward the power supply though... Hope you get it fixed!

Downloaded MBM and have been watching it's temps for about five to ten minutes now, done nothing more then surf the web and its held steady at Case 91*F,CPU 109*F..

Hmm... it's definitely not a temperature issue then. ~100 degrees, give or take 10-15 is normal. My CPU usually runs around 45 degree celsius and it never reboots like that... I'd say to definitely check the power supply. Power supplies can do odd things to computers. I had a bad one once that would shut down. I'd go Start > Shutdown and it would act like it was shutting down, get to the screen that said "Windows is shutting down" and then it would just freeze there. I replaced it with a new power supply, and it works like a charm now... weird huh?