I've been having an irritating problem with a computer restarting without warning. It can happen at any time but always happens if there is heavy load. When it happens the screen just goes blank then the bios page shows up. When windows loads it says is has recovered from a serious error.
I've tried a few things:
prime95 won't run stable at all (the answers the computer gives can be very wrong).
Squaring a number repeatedly using calculator causes a crash after about a minute.
I wrote a small stress test programme aimed not to test the memory much and it crashed after several minutes (it crashed at a time which would have used most (though still very little) memory).
I couldn't make it load Linux off the cd in anything other than command line mode.
Occasionally windows explorer goes a little before the restart.
Its not the memory as I moved it into my other computer and everything was fine. I also tried putting 256mb of good memory into the broken computer and it would still restart though less readily. It had had 512.
So basically whats wrong? The problem has come on in the last week or so and nothing has been changed during that time as far as I know. It runs much slower than it used to - probably due to the instability.
It has:
AthlonXP 2000
512 Mb memory
GeForce2 MX200 32MB graphics
ASRock K7s41 mobo
Windows XP service pack 2.
The voltages look ok, the CPU runs a little hot (62*C) but is rated for 90*C so should be ok. The northbridge gets hot (I'd guess around 50 or so) but has no sensor...