[ILUG] [OT] Unexplainable crashing

[John Madden]

I had this problem at home. The computer kept rebooting itself. I took it
apart and noticed that the CPU fan wasn't spinning very fast. I replaced
that and now it's working fine.

On Wed, 14 Feb 2001 Carolan Goggin didst pronounce:

:Okay, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with Linux, I'm afraid.
:What's happening is that my computer is crashing a few times during the
:day, but especially in the evening when I'm online.  The computer doesn't
:freeze or anything, it just suddenly restarts for no apparent reason.  It
:sometimes does this when it is unattended, sitting silently on its own.  I
:don't know what's wrong.  The computer is a home-brew so I have no-one to
:complain to.  It worked fine for a few weeks, until I brought the computer
:to the RDS for the Young Scientist exhibition.  It may have got a knock or
:something, but I checked that everything is in position and all the wires
:are plugged in right.
:
:I originally thought the problem was to do with the fan in the power
:supply, and I still think that could be the problem.  I have Genesys Health
:Monitoring software on my computer, and it tells me that my system fan (the
:one in the power supply) is not spinning.  So I looked at the fan, and it
:seemed to be spinning, but much slower than it should be spinning.  So I
:checked in the BIOS, and it said the fan wasn't spinning too.  I took the
:power supply out and sent it back to where I got it.  They sent me a
:replacement fre of charge.  I put that in.  It seems to be spinning much
:faster, and the air coming out of it is much cooler, but both Genesys and
:the BIOS still think it's not spinning.
:
:Now the computer is _not_ overheating.  I have checked this and set my
:monitoring software to warn me if it overheats.  And it's not overheating.
:Definitely.
:
:One thing I did notice is that it doesn't crash in Linux as much as it does
:in Windows.  I know this is only to be expected, but it hasn't crashed in
:Linux for weeks (certainly not since I got my new power supply) whereas in
:Windows it crashes about every half hour.  This is partly because I haven't
:left the computer running Linux for a full day at a time because of
:problems I'm having with X (which should be solved when I get Mandrake 7.2
:- thanks Ruairi!).  Would it be possible that this is a software problem
:rather than a hardware problem?
:
:Anyway I am completely at a loss.  I need help.
:
:Love
:Carolan
:
:

-- 
Chat ya later,

John.