Comp dying/acting up/being not nice

[seireikhaan]

Howdy y'all. My desktop recently begun acting up in a fairly undesirable way. If I run any remotely intensive program(games are all I've tested so far), it just ups and dies. However, the light stays on and I can still hear a quiet whirring noise. Additionally, restarting any time soon causes it to act up to. It whirs pretty loudly for a few seconds, the light comes on, but nothing shows up on the monitor. Then it goes back to the quiet whirring. It seems to fix itself after an hour or so and will start back up.

My first thoughts were maybe it was the power supply, but I'm not really that well educated on these things. Any ideas or help? I'd obviously prefer to get this fixed myself instead of paying someone else to do it for me and I'm pretty sure I can follow basic instructions if a part needs replacing, but I can't really do that unless I know what's actually being the problem.

[Xiahou]

My first guess would be dust buildup causing cooling problems. When's the last time you looked inside or cleaned it out?

[seireikhaan]

Truthfully I'm not 100% sure when it was. I know it was at least a year(bad khaan, bad). Cleaned it out, got it started. Not testing anything intensive yet, going to run a full anti-virus scan first just in case it's something like that causing an issue.

[seireikhaan]

And that's a negatory. Pulled the same stunt just browsing and running the scan.

[Xiahou]

Ok, an A/V scan would thrash your disk drive pretty hard. Maybe you should explore that possibility...

Get a SMART utility to see if there are any indications of a failing drive. I like SpeedFan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php), but CrystalDiskInfo (http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html) is supposed to be good too.

[seireikhaan]

So, I got SpeedFan, but I confess I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to be looking for or doing with it. I don't suppose there's a layan's tutorial?

[Xiahou]

So, I got SpeedFan, but I confess I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to be looking for or doing with it. I don't suppose there's a layan's tutorial?OK, launch SpeedFan, then click the SMART tab. Then pick your HD from the drop down list at the top. Click the refresh button to the right of the drop down if nothing shows up.

Next, click the 'perform in depth on-lin analysis...' button. This will open a web page that will give you some information about all the different SMART metrics from you disk and compare it to others of the same model.

The laptop I'm currently on shows the following, which means it should have a reliable hard drive....
11673

[seireikhaan]

Hrm... well I suppose the good news is speedfan didn't have anything to report:

https://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x246/greaterkhaan/compstatus_zps0071caa1.png

Unfortunately, I guess that puts me back to square 1 if it starts puckering out on me again. :(

Thanks for all the help.

edit: trying crystal-thingy as well.

edit2: Doesn't seem to be finding anything else, either. I don't think, anyways... am I missing something out of these two?

https://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x246/greaterkhaan/compstatus2_zps935ea062.png

[seireikhaan]

And it puckered out after about 20 minutes of non-intensive use. :cry: Wasn't overheating. Just conked. Should I invest in a power supply tester?

[Husar]

Hard to say, could also be a mainboard problem IMO.

Can't you get a power supply from someone else to test with that?

[Xiahou]

Crashing under no load makes it a bit harder to troubleshoot.... Just to be sure, scan for malware (http://www.malwarebytes.org/mwb-download/).

Other than that, it's probably time to start looking thru Windows Event Viewer (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/open-event-viewer#1TC=windows-7) logs and that gets a little trying for the uninitiated.