My PC keeps re-starting either during the boot process or a few minutes after it has started any ideas why ?

Question

My PC keeps re-starting either during the boot process or a few minutes after it has started any ideas why ?

Answer 1

My computer is doing a similar thing, except mine just turns back on after it shuts down.

I'm almost positive my case was because I had a short in my wire.  I just got a new power cord to plug into the back of it.  Now it works fine.

Hope this helped!

Answer 2

could be hardware failure... sounds like either the hard drive or something on the motherboard.  some specs would help...

or it could be a virus.

try booting in safe mode (i am guessing you are running XP / Vista) and once you are up and running see if you have the same problem.  If you don't, I would think it is a virus / hard drive problem.

if you still have the same problem in safe mode, probably an issue with some other hardware

Answer 3

There are several possibilities - Roughly in order of likelyhood:

1. Bad power supply

2. over-heating (Dust build-up on the CPU heatsink, or bad fan

3. Defective spots in the hard drive "shorting" the power supply.  (Could also be a corrupted hard drive, but since it reboots at different points in the boot process, this is much less likely, but fixable with a chkdsk.)

5. Bad memory

4. Defective Motherboard

6. (way way down the list) bad CPU

I personally would try fixing #2 first, it's the easiest and almost free...  Get a can of "compressed air" open the computer up and blow out the dust from the heatsink fins...  turn it on with the cover removed and make sure the fan on the heatsink is spinning.

Unless you hear a "clicking sound" (usually in "groups of 4" coming from the hard drive, the next thing I would do is replace the power supply.

These two things will resovle about 90% of the problems...  

Answer 4

Power supply voltage problem, memory issue, or Windows corruption.  More times than not for me it has been a power supply issue.

Answer 5

Either your windows is corrupt, or you have a bad memory module (most likely).

When windows trys to read / write to this bad sector of memory, a critical stop is forced, and that computer starts again.

This is of course, just a guess.

But a likely one.

Try removing one memory module at a time and see if your problem goes away.