Penny Arcade Forums› Games and Technology› Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.

Random Shutdown

Mustachio JonesMustachio Jones jerseyRegistered User regular
edited July 2008 in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
Alright, so a good friend of mine is having a pretty ridiculous and annoying problem with his computer: it shuts down "randomly". We thought it to be overheating video card, as he had one from a couple of years ago from a line that would do that instead of throttling back. He gets new parts, slaps it all together, and bam, he gets hit with it again. Two things: he didn't reinstall XP, and it only happens when the system is under some form of load, IE when he's playing a game.

Did the new driver dance, and it looks like we've narrowed it down to a problem with DirectX, but when he goes in to safe mode to uninstall it, system shuts down. I told him to run a dxdiag and some virus scanners, but when this problem started happening there was no form of network connection on the machine.

I'm in IT support, and I'm usually pretty good at diagnosing things like this, but I cannot for the life of me think of anything else to fix it other than a drive wipe and a reinstall of Windows, which he really does not want to do.

Any thoughts?

tl;dr machine is shutting down under load, new parts yielded no results, thinking it's a problem with directx or windows itself.


Edit: Parts he replaced: Mobo, CPU, memory, PSU,

Edit 2: video card

Mustachio Jones on

Posts

  • imperial6imperial6 Registered User regular
    edited July 2008
    PSU or mobo, probably the mobo.

    imperial6 on
  • Mustachio JonesMustachio Jones jerseyRegistered User regular
    edited July 2008
    Replaced both, problem persisted.

    Mustachio Jones on
  • SushisourceSushisource Registered User regular
    edited July 2008
    When you say shutting down I assume you mean a hard poweroff. As in the comp just goes "boom" and blackness.

    Not actually shutting down as in windows says "Shutting Down" and the comp does a soft poweroff?

    If this is the case, and you've replaced all of the parts except GPU it must be software or GPU related unless you received some faulty hardware. I would first test load conditions with a different GPU (hopefully you have one lying around somewhere). If the problem is solved then it's a GPU issue. If not, I would check your bios settings and make sure nothing is awry.

    It's pretty unusual for a software issue to cause a hard shutdown. I really have no idea what it would be without a little hands on time.

    Sushisource on
    Some drugee on Kavinsky's 1986
    kavinskysig.gif
  • Mustachio JonesMustachio Jones jerseyRegistered User regular
    edited July 2008
    In my infinite wisdom I forgot that he also bought a new GPU.

    So that pretty much rules all hardware out except the harddrives. He's gone for the week and doesn't want me formatting or anything, but I'm gonna go see if I can get a dxdiag readout. It really doesn't make any sense to me, though the fact that it's pulling a hard shutdown when he tries to get into safemode raises some flags about a bad install of XP. I'm gonna bring a spare harddisk with me to install XP on it and use it as a control.

    Mustachio Jones on
  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    edited July 2008
    ya, seems to be a bad XP install. replacing all the hardware without re-installing XP is just plain stupid. Yes, I know it can be done, but it's just plain stupid. it honestly could be an entirely different problem between before and after replacing the parts(i.e. hardware issue before replacement, XP issue after).

    wunderbar on
    XBL: thewunderbar PSN: thewunderbar NNID: thewunderbar Steam: wunderbar87 Twitter: wunderbar
  • Mustachio JonesMustachio Jones jerseyRegistered User regular
    edited July 2008
    wunderbar wrote: »
    ya, seems to be a bad XP install. replacing all the hardware without re-installing XP is just plain stupid. Yes, I know it can be done, but it's just plain stupid. it honestly could be an entirely different problem between before and after replacing the parts(i.e. hardware issue before replacement, XP issue after).

    This is precisely what I told him. If you're going through the trouble of spending >$500 on new PC parts, it means you want performance. You're not going to get the performance you want on a bogged down install of XP, and at the same time the OS doesn't like being tossed around chipsets, so you're going to run into problems.

    It definitely sounds like a DX problem because of it recurring during situations where DX itself is forced to run. Might as well nuke from orbit just to make sure everything dies, though.

    Mustachio Jones on
  • wabbitehwabbiteh Registered User regular
    edited July 2008
    When the system comes back up, is there a "windows has encountered a serious error" message, or somesuch? If it is, you need to re-enable BSODs. By default, Windows XP doesn't show a blue screen, it just restarts. Re-enable BSODs, you can look up the stop code (or you may get lucky and it'll tell you what driver it is).

    Right click My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced (Tab) -> Startup and Recovery -> uncheck Automatically Restart.


    Oh, and I'm not a huge techie, so I might be really wrong on this. YMMV.

    wabbiteh on
Sign In or Register to comment.
Penny Arcade Forums› Games and Technology› Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern