My computer a couple of days ago, when I was playing warcraft 3, just restarted a couple minutes into the game, like it had lost power for a second. I thought there might have been a power problem or something. So when my computer started up again I went back to the game and it did it again. I waited for windows to start up again, ran scandisk incase my HDD was damaged by the sudden loss of power. My computer stayed on for a while, so I did a test and tried to play Halo, a few minutes into the game the computer restarted again. I decided to run all my spyware, adware and antivirus(AVG) stuff during the night. Nothing showed up and my computer stayed on all night with no problems. I'm not sure what could do this other than my gfx card, or maybe DirectX is messin up, cause a few days ago it changed the registry as spybot told me.
Any ideas?
Sounds like your computer's overheating, either your processor or your power supply. It's pretty common on processor-intensive games.
I had the same thing happen when I was playing Half Life 2 a few years ago...turned out my puny power supply couldn't handle it. I replaced it with a new, higher wattage PSU and problem solved.
Thanks Pete, I'll get it checked out this afternoon. But its a bit strange cause I've had the same setup for nearly a year, with no change.
I was gonna say "yeah, but now it's summer and"... and then realised that you are in australia
It might be the PSU. It happens to me, it seems that some way they "wear out". I have replaced one of my hard disks for another, bigger one, and sometimes I just *can't* turn on the computer without it turning off by itself a couple of seconds later. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I don't. Apparently, according to what my PSU "takes", it's far from enough, but after 2.5 years it's failing more and more.
You could try and borrow a more powerful PSU and do some tests. If it works that way, buy a new one. They are not very expensive parts.
Agreed. Lack of power from the PSU and overheating are the most common cause of random restarts. You could check all your fans to make sure they are still running, and if your motherboard has temperature monitors, check them.