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From: Ret. on 30 Nov 2009 13:23
My grand-daughter is using an old Evesham desktop PC of mine which is
running XP. Some weeks ago it began randomly re-booting and, as a result,
crashed completely and refused to restart - probably because it shut down
when doing something important!

Yesterday I did a clean re-install of XP and, initially, everything was
working fine until MS Update began installing Service Pack 2. In the middle
of the install, the pc again did a spontaneous re-boot and, consequently,
refused to restart again and Recovery Console reported 'unrecoverable
problems'.

I've opened up the case and given everything a good clean out and the only
hardware problem I could find was the fan on the Radeon 8500 graphics card
was dead. Clearly this would cause the graphics card to overheat - but could
this be the cause of the random re-boots? I'm certainly hoping so because a
suitable replacement fan would only cost a few pounds.

Up until finding the dead fan I was leaning toward it being a memory problem
and was going to run Memtest after re-installing XP for the second time.
Hopefully I wont now have to do that!

Kev

From: Stefan Patric on 30 Nov 2009 15:46
On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:23:06 +0000, Ret. wrote:

> My grand-daughter is using an old Evesham desktop PC of mine which is
> running XP. Some weeks ago it began randomly re-booting and, as a
> result, crashed completely and refused to restart - probably because it
> shut down when doing something important!
>
> Yesterday I did a clean re-install of XP and, initially, everything was
> working fine until MS Update began installing Service Pack 2. In the
> middle of the install, the pc again did a spontaneous re-boot and,
> consequently, refused to restart again and Recovery Console reported
> 'unrecoverable problems'.
>
> I've opened up the case and given everything a good clean out and the
> only hardware problem I could find was the fan on the Radeon 8500
> graphics card was dead. Clearly this would cause the graphics card to
> overheat - but could this be the cause of the random re-boots? I'm
> certainly hoping so because a suitable replacement fan would only cost a
> few pounds.
>
> Up until finding the dead fan I was leaning toward it being a memory
> problem and was going to run Memtest after re-installing XP for the
> second time. Hopefully I wont now have to do that!

It could also be a failing power supply, or a bad, failing or overheating
CPU, or failing hard drive or bad sectors on the hard drive, or any
combination of those as well as other things. Such uncommanded shutdowns
are hard to trace.

On my previous system, it took about 6 months to trace the problem to a
bad or failing CPU. Replaced it, and never had another problem with it.


Stef

From: philo on 30 Nov 2009 19:14
Ret. wrote:
> My grand-daughter is using an old Evesham desktop PC of mine which is
> running XP. Some weeks ago it began randomly re-booting and, as a
> result, crashed completely and refused to restart - probably because it
> shut down when doing something important!
>
> Yesterday I did a clean re-install of XP and, initially, everything was
> working fine until MS Update began installing Service Pack 2. In the
> middle of the install, the pc again did a spontaneous re-boot and,
> consequently, refused to restart again and Recovery Console reported
> 'unrecoverable problems'.
>
> I've opened up the case and given everything a good clean out and the
> only hardware problem I could find was the fan on the Radeon 8500
> graphics card was dead. Clearly this would cause the graphics card to
> overheat - but could this be the cause of the random re-boots? I'm
> certainly hoping so because a suitable replacement fan would only cost a
> few pounds.
>
> Up until finding the dead fan I was leaning toward it being a memory
> problem and was going to run Memtest after re-installing XP for the
> second time. Hopefully I wont now have to do that!
>
> Kev



Yep I've seen that plenty of times

a bad fan on the video card can indeed make the system crash or lock up


replace the fan at once ...though it may be too late to save the video card.

May be easier to just get a whole new video card
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