Comp dying/acting up/being not nice

**seireikhaan** · 12-30-2013, 22:39

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** · 12-30-2013, 22:49

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

**seireikhaan** · 12-30-2013, 23:57

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** · 12-31-2013, 00:14

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

**Xiahou** · 12-31-2013, 00:44

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, but CrystalDiskInfo is supposed to be good too.

**seireikhaan** · 12-31-2013, 15:46

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?