Restarting After Gaming....Help!!

[haydox]

I had an:
-ECS K8 NVIDIA Socket 754 DDR400 AGP (P21110) NFORCE3-A ATX Retail Box mobo
-AMD Athlon64 3000+ newcastle
-1Gb of Kingston RAM,
-PNY Verto GeFOrce 6 6600GT 128mb
-Ebuyer value 500W PSU

(all of the above highly rated on the ebuyer site!) but after playing some games, when i quit them, the computer restarted!! I was sure it wasnt the computer not being able to handle the game, as it restarted when i closed the game (not during), and also my pc is quite powerful so can easily handle the games. The game it started doing this on was UT 2004.

But then something went wrong with the PSU and i needed to replace the mobo, CPU and PSU.

So now i have the same mobo and CPU but a X-Power 500W psu (£40 from Maplin - not the cheap crappy ebuyer one £12!). I thought it would have solved the problem but when i quit CoD2 just now it restarted for no reason!! I havent a clue what it is as no-one has had any problems with the mobo or cpu on the ebuyer reviews, and i got a quite expensive PSU this time so hopefully it is a good one!

There are only 2 things i could think of it being, either the PSU not being powerful enough (but it is 500W!) or the computer getting too hot because the tower has no case, is surrounded on all sides except front (by the desk and a wall), and only has the CPU fan, graphics card fan and the 2 PSU fans cooling it.

If it is the PSU not being powerful enough, it is easily solved by taking this one back to Maplin and getting a 600W one (woohoo more money being spent! ). And if it is the heat problem i can easily make a simple rig (on the open side of the tower - opposite the mobo) which i can mount some fans on to provide extra cooling. Out of the 2 i would go for PSU lacking in power as i saw on a review that it can cause your pc to restart.

If anyone can tell me what is wrong it would be much appreciated as the last time my pc restarted after games i needed to wait 2 weeks for a replacement cpu and mobo as the psu blew up (or something of that nature)!! And i dont want to have to go through it again!!

Thanks

Richard Haydock

 

[haydox]

UPDATE!!!

I've just tried to figure out what happened and.....

First i loaded up CoD2, walked around for a minute or 2, then quit, and it exited fine, no reboot.

But then i loaded the game up, minimised it to look on Everest at the temps (46 degrees C), maximised the game again, quit it, and it rebooted!!!

So...next i tested Unreal Tournament (which caused a reboot before i had my mobo, cpu and psu replaced) and it loaded, played and quit fine, twice!!

After UT2004 i tried CoD2 again, first without minimising and it exited fine, then i tried minimising and checking everest again, and just as i maximised CoD2 it restarted, i didnt even need to quit the game that time!

Also i tried UT2004 again, but this time i minimised it, and when i minimised i noticed a warning box on the system tray, it said that windows had encountered a corrupt file, unfortunately i didnt get to see what it was, but i maximised UT2004 again and guess what???.....yes, you guessed it, it restarted again!!!

However, once it had restarted i got that annoying error report thing XP has and i looked on the details and it was sending 2 files with the report, these were

'C:\DOCUME~1\Family\LOCALS~1\Temp\WERf50a.dir00\Mini020506-03.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\Family\LOCALS~1\Temp\WERf50a.dir00\sysdata.xml'

and the error signature was

BCCode : 1000000a BCP1 : 9D086240 BCP2 : 00000002 BCP3 : 00000000
BCP4 : 8051EC1C OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 256_1

It appears that when i minimise games windows encounters a corrupt file which causes the computer to reboot when the game is maximised!! When i sent the error report i was given a summary and it appears the cause is an 'unknown device driver', there is no solution (just what i want to hear!) and it means windows encountered a stop error which forced a restart!

If anyone can offer any help as to the cause of this corrupt file, or how to fix it i would be very grateful!! All i can think of is a complete system rebuild (installing all drivers, windows, etc.)

Thanks again

Richard Haydock

 

[Mr. Switch]

Backup yoru files and reformat.

I believe that its a problem with the windows files conflicting with other files. if you reformat, the corruted/missing files will be replaced by new ones so your software problems should dissapear.

 

[iam_not_2fast4u]

no something is overheating, so your system shuts down to protect itself

 

[haydox]

I originally thought it was overheating, but if it was that then just playing the game would cause it to reboot, i wouldnt need to minimise and then maximise it!!

Also, because of the corrupt file error i believe it is a windows fault.

Or i thought it may be a faulty 'bit' of memory, which it only hits when gaming, but then RAM is random so it wouldnt only hit it when the game closes.

Basically im inclined to agree with the windows reinstall idea. As a cause for the corrupt file it may be that when my pc broke the first time, i just installed the new mobo, cpu and psu, i didnt reinstall windows, so the files could have been corrupted when it broke the first time due to a cheap crappy psu!

Ill get my bro to try reinstalling as it is the most likely out of the 3.
-reinstall windows
-faulty RAM (but it only happens when closing a game, not randomly)
-overheating (it doesnt always happen, even after playing some games for a while, only when they r minimised then maximised, then closed)

Thanks again, ill probs get back to you IF/WHEN it starts working again so anyone else with the prob can find a solution!

Rich