Thread of PC Woes, Troubles, Problems, and Issues

Hey guys, I've met a problem once again it seems. I went the entire December vacation playing games and now suddenly when in-game for a few minutes my PC will instantly power down and restart. I have also noticed a lot of coil whine which sounds like it's coming from the PSU.

After becoming very frustrated I have underclocked my GPU to well under half its full capacity, and the PSU doesn't whine when under stress anymore, neither does my PC restart.

My question is whether the PSU is becoming weaker or my GPU is drawing too much power or something.

Specs:

500Watt Mercury PSU
ASRock G41C-Gs/M Motherboard
Club3D HD5770 512MB
2x2GB Corsair ValueSelect
Core 2 Quad Q9300
 
Mb12 said:
Hey guys, I've met a problem once again it seems. I went the entire December vacation playing games and now suddenly when in-game for a few minutes my PC will instantly power down and restart. I have also noticed a lot of coil whine which sounds like it's coming from the PSU.

After becoming very frustrated I have underclocked my GPU to well under half its full capacity, and the PSU doesn't whine when under stress anymore, neither does my PC restart.

My question is whether the PSU is becoming weaker or my GPU is drawing too much power or something.

Specs:

500Watt Mercury PSU
ASRock G41C-Gs/M Motherboard
Club3D HD5770 512MB
2x2GB Corsair ValueSelect
Core 2 Quad Q9300
Click to expand...

This does seem to be the likely cause. How old is that PSU of yours? It's pretty much a given that your GPU would draw more power as it warms up, but PSUs will deteriorate over time, and that which was once adequate will suddenly not be able to push enough juice through. So I tend to look at that as the likely culprit first.
 
Any recent driver updates or Overclock Frequency/ Voltage tweaks?

First thing I would do is borrow a strong PSU to test.
 
shadowfox said:
This does seem to be the likely cause. How old is that PSU of yours? It's pretty much a given that your GPU would draw more power as it warms up, but PSUs will deteriorate over time, and that which was once adequate will suddenly not be able to push enough juice through. So I tend to look at that as the likely culprit first.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm guessing it reached it's end, I can't even remember how old this PSU is.

bromster said:
Any recent driver updates or Overclock Frequency/ Voltage tweaks?

First thing I would do is borrow a strong PSU to test.
Click to expand...

No, no drivers or overclocks, but the problem did start after installing Company of Heroes and its expansions. I think I'm too lazy to check with another PSU, so maybe I'll just give it to a PC shop and let them tell me what's wrong. As you can see, the PC is already old and I'm gonna upgrade end of the year, so it just need to survive until then.

UPDATE: Replaced the 500W nameless power supply with second hand Coolermaster 500W now in perfect working order.
 
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Hey everybody. Back in the day you used to get a program that ran off a 3.5'' disk that booted up your PC and then would check that all your hardware was in working order. Does anyone know what this program was called or of a equivalent of it?
 
I also have an Ultimate Boot CD, which does Memtests, etc. Haven't had to use it in ever, which is awesome!!!
 
Guys, I have a very very weird issue on my PC. Some days I can play games for an entire day without issues, then again, sometimes I get BSOD issues, the display "breaks" as in, it looks like everything went static, sometimes even with a static sound coming over the speakers.

I have tried a different gpu, different RAM, reseated my CPU, reinstalled windows, installed the newest drivers etc... When this occurs I have to reboot the PC to solve it. Sometimes I have to leave the PC off completely as it keeps on doing that.

Sometimes when this thing happens I get a little popup that says "Skype has stopped working", not sure if that is relevant in any way.

Any advice?
 
Well considering what you have tried already, it would seem to me that your motherboard is on its way out.

You could also try another psu, that's quick and easy to test if you can get one somewhere.
 
Hey folks

I never ask for help unless google can't supply me with a solution.

I have a user that opens our financial software on the server, uses it for about 30min then all of a sudden it freezes and he can't even close it using the little red cross in the top corner, all he gets is the error ding from windows. All the other users are fine with the software so I don't know exactly how to troubleshoot that problem except to keep closing it via Taskmanager but it's frustrating.

Any ideas??

Thanks
 
sycogrim said:
Hey folks

I never ask for help unless google can't supply me with a solution.

I have a user that opens our financial software on the server, uses it for about 30min then all of a sudden it freezes and he can't even close it using the little red cross in the top corner, all he gets is the error ding from windows. All the other users are fine with the software so I don't know exactly how to troubleshoot that problem except to keep closing it via Taskmanager but it's frustrating.

Any ideas??

Thanks
Click to expand...
Need some more info on your mentioned problem:
- Is the software web based or does it require a client to be installed on his machine?
- Does the freezing occur every time he uses it?
- Is his explorer (assuming it's a Windows OS) freezing or just the software?
 
chan0o said:
Need some more info on your mentioned problem:
- Is the software web based or does it require a client to be installed on his machine?
- Does the freezing occur every time he uses it?
- Is his explorer (assuming it's a Windows OS) freezing or just the software?
Click to expand...
Yes more info is required.

If you kill the network connection on one of the other machines does it do the same? Perhaps you should update your nic drivers or try another card. other than that im not sure with the lack of information.
 
chan0o said:
Need some more info on your mentioned problem:
- Is the software web based or does it require a client to be installed on his machine?
- Does the freezing occur every time he uses it?
- Is his explorer (assuming it's a Windows OS) freezing or just the software?
Click to expand...

Like I said it's software that sits on our server, it doesn't get installed however the user has to be mapped to our network drive.

Yes he runs a tax query for a client then once he goes back to it's main screen it freezes.

The entire Win OS is fine, I checked the explorer.exe process and all was working fine, including being able to browse and do everything else on the machine.

Between myself and the software supplier we managed to rule out that it's the program causing the problem as no other users are experiencing the issue or any issues for that matter.
 
sycogrim said:
Like I said it's software that sits on our server, it doesn't get installed however the user has to be mapped to our network drive.

Yes he runs a tax query for a client then once he goes back to it's main screen it freezes.

The entire Win OS is fine, I checked the explorer.exe process and all was working fine, including being able to browse and do everything else on the machine.

Between myself and the software supplier we managed to rule out that it's the program causing the problem as no other users are experiencing the issue or any issues for that matter.
Click to expand...

Cool, just wanted to confirm that the entire software is on the server.
Sometimes the user installs an interface to lessen load on the server.

Anyways, from what you said, the freeze occur after the query.
Can you see the query log?
A log would help greatly (just don't post it publicly :p) to see if the query had anything to do with the freeze.

It could be that the user created an invalid/erroneous query, and the software didn't catch such exception.
If you could duplicate the query, run it under another user account to see if it freezes.
 
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