Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots

On 2008-09-20, Java Jive <java@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Assuming it is actually hardware for the moment, though I'm still not
absolutely and entirely convinced, I've compiled a checklist here,
though I think you've done some of it already ...
http://tinyurl.com/6nmrtp
... standing in for ...
http://www.cemh.eclipse.co.uk/JavaJive/PCHardware/HardwareFaults/HardwareFaults.html

Thank you.

Given that your tale of woes features graphics quite a lot, perhaps
that might be a good place to start? Is the graphics card seated
firmly and cleanly? Or with the cycles of thermal expansion and
contraction with being switched on and off has it worked loose, or has
dust got down between the slot's and the card's contacts leading to
imperfect connection? Is dust caked on a the card's heatsink causing
it to overheat?

I just opened up the box and vacuumed out *a large quantity* of what can
be described as dust, for lack of a better term. I don't even know what
some of the things are in there; I'm really not very technical. There's the
psu, I suppose, that has a fan and there was lots of dust on it, and also a
little doohickey at the bottom that I took to be the cpu, with a kind of
spinning black wheel that's fun to get going with the vacuum cleaner and
that had a lot of dust embedded in it too.

The graphics card--would an "imperfect connection" cause the machine to
reboot? I don't know. I replaced the graphics card in this machine;
when the old one went south, there were symptoms: I couldn't get into X,
and there were pretty colors on the console in the end that shouldn't
have been there, but no rebooting.

Thanks for your help.
.

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