Intermittent PC Trouble [And How I Solved It]

Okay this is driving me crazy! The problem is that my PC hangs up (with an annoying noise from the speakers) and restarts for no good reason! This is not something new – it has been bothering me since the day I bought my new PC back in November 2005. I have learned to live with it but now it is getting more and more frequent and downright annoying.

This happens completely at random so it translates to countless lost documents and having to occasionally tear my hair out after defeating a difficult boss in a videogame. And the strange part is that this problem occurs when I do some CPU intensive (and important) tasks such as playing video games, photo editing, etc. Not while doing light (and unimportant) tasks such as browsing the internet, writing this rant post, etc. The last time that it crashed, I decided that enough was enough. Something had to be done, so the first thing I did was pester the technical support of my retailer.

But it seemed that even they had no idea as to what was going on. They told me to send the PC back to their shop. So I did. At first they determined that something was wrong with the processor. So they changed it. But that didn’t help. Later they thought that the motherboard was damaged and they took that out and changed it too! After two days of wasting my time I finally got a phone call saying that they could not solve the problem! Since my warranty period had expired (maybe I should have dealt with it the first time it occurred instead of trying to live with it instead), so a refund was out of the question. It seems I am stuck with this PC (except with a brand new processor and motherboard).

Frustration led me to search the net. I ran into a couple of topics dealing with overheating issues and the symptom seemed strangely similar to mine. Now, it never occurred to me that any one of my 3.2GHz P4 processor, 120 GB HDD, 1 GB of RAM or the Radeon 256 MB video card could be overheating. I quickly downloaded SpeedFan and checked my motherboard temperatures. And boy was I shocked! My processor often ran past 65 C (hey I think my processor’s hot!) and motherboard temp would spike past 50 C (and then restart) – hmmm so the restarts weren’t completely random after all.

The cause? It seemed that my measly old single cooling fan and cramped case wasn’t enough to save my computer from meltdown. Now that I discovered the root of the problem it was time to remedy it (with no thanks to tech support). A bigger case with at least three 120mm cooling fans (the really big ones) and a side vent was a must. To prevent the CPU from overheating, I replaced the stock cooler with Thermaltake’s Big Typhoon Cooler (it’s whisper-silent and works like a charm).

Settling on which case to buy was a tough decision. As my inner gaming geek told me, the case had to be big for proper air flow as well as showy. I liked Thermaltake’s Tsunami but it lacked support for three cooling fans. The same could be said for Aspire X-Cruiser. There was this absurd looking black case with 5 cooling fans from Antec, the P180, but I passed.

In my hunt I came across Gigabyte’s 3D Aurora 570 case. Now Gigabyte is not know for making cases. But this beauty caught my eye with it’s simple yet elegant design (and, of course, it’s cooling capabilities). It also came with a changeable side-vent and transparent windows to show of those heat-spewing parts of mine. Match that with Gigabyte’s patent pending [Light projector] (which can project any word that you can come up with) and a cool looking brushed matte black paint job, and I knew that this baby was for me. To cut a long story short, I didn’t find any retailers in Bangladesh that had this case so I had to import it from abroad paying double than the normal price (because of tariffs and transport expenses) which would have bought me a top-of-the-line graphics card. But it’s the price I am willing to pay to get rid of those irritating restarts (oh the horror!).

If you guys are facing the same problem, then stay tuned for my upcoming article “HOW TO GET RID OF OVERHEATING PC PROBLEMS”.

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