Lately my recently built computer has been causing problems.
The first is the power would always seem to go off. I'd be, for example, playing a game or listening to music and it would shut off. I had two theories.
First I guessed it was a heating issue. It's winter time here and I always have the heat on in my house due to where I live, and the computer tower is next to a heat vent. I figured that perhaps it was heat, and moved it away and kept my house cooler for about 2 weeks. It helped a bit, but it kept turning off.
The second possibility is the PSU. I had a cheap 400 watt PSU in the computer. It was quite old (didn't even have SATA power connectors). I've since bought a new Corsair 900 watt PSU and it seems to be fine, and I've only experienced one shut off. I should note that I had a graphics card (ASUS ATI 1650XT) fail while using the previous PSU. While playing TF2, one of the components on the card popped right off and blackened the PCB. I'm not sure what it was, however. It was a small black donut shaped thing with copper wire twisted around it. However, I think that was due to a dirty fan and thus a resulting overheated card.
However, now that I've installed a new PSU and 8800GTS card, I'm still getting shut downs and crashes. On occasion the power will shut right off and I have to manually turn it back on. Sometimes it will turn right off again, and I have to turn it on once more.
More frequently it seems that I'm getting different crashes. I've been getting a lot of BSOD when playing games, but I think that's just dodgy nVidia drivers (which I've since replaced with 3rd party Omega Drivers which seem to be fine). Despite that, though, I frequently get crashes, resulting in either complete shut downs or just a lock up. It's primarily while playing games, but I've experienced it while playing video files too.
Could it just be a dying hard drive? I have my OS installed on an old (5 year~) IDE drive, while all my data is on SATA drives. I'm going to replace the IDE with a SATA eventually, but I'm not sure if that's what's causing the crashes or not.
Excuse me if this all sounds mixed up, I'm fucking high on Vicodin.
Double check that all your fans are clean and working. The symptoms are similar to what I encountered before, failing to notice my CPU fan was clogged up with dust bunnies.
I'd say it was probably a combination of both, but I suggest checking fans/thermal paste. Running speedfan or a similar app to check your temps. Having a decent power supply is a must though as cheap/old ones can kill computers.
OP here. Since updating to the Omega Drivers I've had no issues.
However, tonight I had a rather strange thing happen a few times. While going about, the computer shut off...sort of. The power stayed on, lights were flashing, DVD drive was spinning. However, the monitor had no picture and there was no HDD activity.
Could that just be a dying drive? My system is on an IDE, while everything else is on SATA. Odd set up, but I'm too lazy to put Windows/Linux on an entire new drive at the moment.