ok... my mate built her own computer, which has been up and running fine for weeks now, until 2 days ago when it started to freeze and switch itself off... now most of the time it wont even start up, the fan whurls for a minute but nothing happens!!

she has done virus checks and stinger checks and found nothing, but has found 38 spyware things... but.. how do you get rid of these is the question.. and could these be the problem?

 

Sounds like it good be heat/gfx related. Describe the syptoms a bit more.

Any beeps at post?

 

no.. when it dosnt start it dosnt get as far as a beep... when it does start though, it can run anything from 30secs up to a couple of hours

 

the symptoms are, as i understand them,.. started to freeze and crash 2 days ago, then wouldnt switch on, now still doing the same, it will switch on occasionaly, and even seem to work fine for a couple hours, then it freezes and crashes, other times it wont start at all, no beeps no nothing just a wherr from the fan, mother board lights on, but nothing it all stops b4 the beep... other times it starts up, runs for a few mins then freezes and dies...

 

it is all very very odd... have gone through the over heating thing, but it dosnt seem to be very consistant with over heating... like i say you can go to it in the morning, and it wont ecven switch on... then you can try and switch it on and it will fire into life and die after 30secs, then on the same day you can fire it up and run it for a couple of hours

 

What memory have you on the motherboard (i.e. size?), try taking some of the memory out and see if it improves things.. most likely issue is heat or motherboard fault..

J

 

The failure to boot up despite the power coming on and fans spinning could be a symptom of a badly seated graphics card with marginal contacts. I'd start off by removing and re-seating it.

There are numerous reasons why it could be freezing and rebooting in use: dodgy memory or a faulty motherboard are most likely I think.

Gary.

 

Doesn't post but the power comes on? Odd to say the least.

When my mobo died (the 1st time) it had similar results but did at least attempt to beep at me. One long continous strangulated death-beep.

I more or less agree with GCollier so far though.

 

Sounds like a short in the mobo, but get her to try replacing all the internal cables and reseating all the cards first.

 

p.s. - deffo not related to spyware - there is nothing that spyware/malware could do to stop post

 

Had this problem in the past. It can be a mixture of different things. Mine was due to RAM timings in the BIOS being too fast for the DIMMS I had installed. And that was with the BIOS timings set to SPD/Auto.

My Sisters PC kept rebooting itself and in some instances NOT coming back up. Download a RAM checker off www.microsoft.com/downloads and found the 2nd DIMM was faulty. Removed this and all is okay again.