I have a V2 Premier two-year old computer that has been giving me fits in the last six months. Namely, it shuts down or restarts at any time it wants to – can be within minutes of startup up to many hours later –no consistent time period. Many times it is triggered by watching a video, listening to an mp3 or trying to print a document. But it can happen by just viewing text e-mails.

As I use the computer for hours each day having this shutdown/restart problem is frustrating. I took the unit to a local computer repair store and they charged me $79 to blow dust off the motherboard and install Win XP SP2. This did not help the problem at all – which I found out after bringing it home. Except that before the computer would shutdown – now it restarts – when the problem occurs..

So I thought there could be a possibility of a virus. I tried formatting the hard drive with the pre-loaded PhoenixWare RecoverPro software. The best I could do was 95% formatting before it went into Win XP installation – this was after many attempts. Doing this formatting did not help the problem.

I purchased Drive Scrubber 2 software and did a 7-pass hard drive format. It took 50 hours straight to do the 7-pass task. I figured if there was a virus this 7-pass should get rid of it. It got rid of the pre-loaded PhoenixWare RecoverPro software and the computer drivers. I purchased a Win XP Pro SP2 OEM Version CD and installed it successfully after five attempts. It seemed that either my DVD-ROM drive was having trouble reading all the data on the CD or the hard drive having difficulty accepting the data? I’m unsure about this. The blue screen with white lettering came up often along with many restarts. Finally after formatting five times, Win XP Pro installed without drivers.

Still the problem continues and I am uncertain what to do about it. I am reluctant to take it back to the local shop since he didn’t even properly troubleshoot it. I don’t have a clue whether it is hardware or software. But seems to me if it was hardware it would probably have broken down by now. And if it was hardware how could the computer stay on for 50 hours straight without shutdown while doing the 7-pass? Windows Media Player 9 does not play videos and cannot be upgraded at Windows Automatic Updates website. The computer also locks up frequently and CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn’t do anything – I have to do a hard shutdown. Also a hard shutdown seems to work better than if the computer is just restarted. Restarting the computer tends to need several more restarts before getting to the desktop successfully. Uniblue Registry Cleaner software has found 120 errors. I have not purchased the software as I’m not sure whether this would really help or not.

This problem has put me far behind in what I need to do on the computer and it came at the worst time financially. I don’t have a clue how much this would cost to repair and even where it would be best to take it to fix with an intermittent problem like this.

Any suggestions on how to resolve this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Jim Thomas

Sounds like hardware for sure. Firstly enter your bios by pushing (usually) F2 Or Del when the computer first switches on, sometimes theres a prompt. Look for 'hardware monitor' and check the CPU temprature. If it goes above 60 then it's overheating and this would cause a shutdown. Also it could be your graphics card overheating or faulty, try another.
If all else fails remove all cards and ram from the mobo and replace 1 by 1 with running the system at full speed (a DVD is good) and see when it goes wrong. If it does it with everything then replace the mobo.

A quick way to find out if the computer is overheating is to take the case cover off and place a house fan next to the computer and see if it will stay on longer. Also you mentioned Windows XP installed without drivers. have you installed all the proper drivers for the computer. The chip set drivers for the motherboard, Video, Lan, and sound. You should also update windows even though you just purchased an OEM cd win SP II there have been allot of updates since SPII was released and it may not have all of them. I personally am against Registry cleaners unless you have advanced knowledge of the registry system. As posted previously by another senior member the Registry cleaners are written with information given to the programmers from software manufactures the problem arises when software changes and registry entries mimic system entries and are deleted by the cleaner thus leaving the OS inoperable.

Edit: I believe that sparkyuiop meant 60 C

Oh I did, thanks Sneakycyber. I must remember me Cees!