PC Reboots

[ieti]

Vacuum cleaners - they can harm computer. Be careful. There are tubes with air under pressure(ghhh do not know how it is eng) which are better for blowing dust that is inside bigger heatsinks(cpu, graphics card) or from power supply.

You can do this "blowing" by yourself too but prepare to cough alot.

You can clean dust with brush, but forgot what type it needs to be. It was something with type of brush hair. One of types can keep static.

[Pornstar]

I clean mine with an old vacuum cleaner, which has function "blow".

[Wield_II]

Cleaned it, had a look at the ram stick's they were a bit dusty.
Not dodgy, wish they were so I could fix my problem.

Fan's were very dusty especially the one at the powersupply.
Will replace the fan's, power supply. Cleaned my pc aswell with CCleaner.
And will probaly reinstall windows xp again.

Btw I can really recommend CCleaner it's very useful.

Thanks again for your time and effort everyone.

[Seher]

Originally Posted by Donatoo

By calculations im going to need around 390 - 410.
That's a huge diffrence from what I'm using at the moment.

That's dangerous. You can easily burn your components that way. I don't think it's strange that it used to work fine. Higher use of the capacity means shorter life time.

Always remember that a decent power supply protects your components while cheap ones could mean danger to them.

[bois]

A nice 500watt or 600 watt power supply is reasonably cheap these days. Building for more capacity is always a good idea. You never know what upgrade you might like to do next. Planning for the future is always a good idea.

RAM is tricky. They could look good and act good but all it take is a bad address block high up in the array to be bad. It would not normally happen in regular work because the OS does not need to address the area but in times of high RAM usage (gaming for example) the OS needs to address the damaged area and then you get the failure. I hate failures like that because they are damn hard to diagnose.
You could use a program like memtest if you think you need to rule it out.

Oh and the tube Ieti mentioned is canned or compressed air. That is best for blowing out dust. Vacuums are not the best because they tend to build up static. I use a special vacuum that does not build static.

[ieti]

In some way i do not like that "cleaning" softwares. They delete some files, registry and do some tweaks. But they can break stuff too. So be careful. If OS is too full with unused software and was not reinstalled from a long time, gives blue screens, restarts sporadically it is better to just reinstall.

As Seher says it is dangerous and a cheap power supply can blow your computer. We had alot ppl in Bulgaria like that before and after that most of hardware forums started threads in which they speaked about good power supplies, which models are better to choose and why.

It is good to have well balanced system. Many ppl still think case and power supply are not so important parts. Good cases supress vibrations from components better, provide ways to keep cables tidy, so air circulation is better and components are cooler. For case fan orientation you have to check how to turn them, so they blow hot air out.

[Wield_II]

I cant find my current powersupply, "Component Pro" the only one I was able to find was about 300W. Oh and my CPU fan only had 1200 RPM
(Rotations per minute) isnt that a bit low? I'm running it with 3000 - 4000 RPM now and see if it works out better.

I know my current powersupply isnt enough, but since it has run well for a long time I doubt that this has occured the problem.

Thanks so much everyone, got me lots wiser and have fixed alot of thing's already.

[ieti]

Well lower RPM is less noise and we all want comp to be less noisy. Bigger fan with less rpm can pump same air flow as smaller fan with more rpm, but bigger is less noisy. If components do not overheat(temperatures are normal) it is better to put it on less rpm or just put it to auto settings when it will measure temperature and put corresponding rpm for you.

300W is not good, 550 - 600W is a good choice. It will provide sufficient power and will not get so hot and noisy.

[time-to-die]

Originally Posted by Donatoo

So you suggest another fan, I already have 2.
Dont know if there's space for another. Not sure if this is the problem though.

No mine 1 i can put in with usb. i just take the cooler than i put my laptop on it. than i put the usb kabel inside my laptop.

[Seher]

As I said, it could have broke because you've always driven it above maximum.

About the CPU fan: Depends on your cooler. My radiator runs at 600rpm and hardly above 1000 :P (Scythe Ninja 3)
Important is how hot your CPU is while gaming. You can monitor that with tools like HWmonitor, but it might be difficult to actually get the value before the PC reboots again :P