
Quote: Originally Posted by
csmith31525
I bought a new desktop in January.
In March it started to just randomly turn off.
Dell replaced all the hardward in April.
In may it started turning off again.
I don't have any viruses, I have plenty of memory and I am thinking the culprit must be the OS....so what now? How can I find out if Windows 7 is causing the problem before I go through the effort to wipe the computer clean and restore it to factory settings??
csmith
could be heat, an app, a power plan setting, etc. Whatever it is it will leave a trail.
Lets check where the info may be kept
1-event viewer
There are several ways to find what the problem is. The best is to go into event viewer (type eventvwr in search). Go to the windows log>application tab.
You want to look for critical errors (they have red in the left column ).
When you find them you want to look for critical errors that say app hang, app crash, or anything that relates to the problem.
When you find them please note the event ID, and the source codes and tell us what they are.
2- BSOD's If you are having blue screens where the computer restarts itself with a blue screen showing you should get us the DMP file.
We really need the actual DMP file.
If you wish to have others assist you with your computer's BSOD symptoms, upload the contents of your "\Windows\Minidump" folder. The procedure:
* Copy the contents of \Windows\Minidump to another (temporary) location somewhere on your machine.
* Zip up the copy.
* Start your own thread in the "Crashes and Debugging" section of the forum and attach the ZIP archive to your post using the "paperclip" (file attachments) button.
* Briefly describe the problem history and circumstances in the same post. Somebody will attend to your query as soon as possible.
There are many other places to look but you can also try rebooting into safe mode (F8) to see if it still does it.
Turning off sleep and hibernate, to again see if it still does it.
Ken