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My System Keeps Shutting Down Randomly!
So here's my situation. Every time I boot into Windows 7, after a certain amount of time (always different) my computer will randomly shut down. Correction: it dies. I hear a small click and that's it. All power is cut off and if other electronic devices weren't working all around me I'd think that the electricity went out.
I'm trying to logically deduce it down to a source, so to help you help me, here's my thought process/story. This will be a long read and I'm starting a little far back but I want to make sure I cover all the bases.
- Ahem -
I first downloaded W7 about a week ago. I made a new partition on my C drive and installed it, and it was love at first sight. After playing with it for a couple of days and reading reviews, I decided that it was stable enough to be my main operating system. I was sick of using XP, but I hated Vista. This seemed to solve both cases, so without any extensive testing or real consideration I formatted my C drive and installed W7 as my main OS. Yes, I'm an idiot.
But being that I didn't have any DVDs and didn't feel like driving 3 miles to wal mart to buy more, I was determined to install it the way I did on my test partition. With Daemon Tools. Again, there seems to be a pattern here. Anyway, my basic plan was this: I have two hard drives. One I use strictly for the OS and any installed programs. That's literally all that is on it. Every file I download, every picture, every video, every mp3, I save onto my storage hard drive. So my plan was to make a new partition on my storage hard drive and install XP on it. Then I would boot into the newly installed xp and format my C drive, then install W7 on the entire drive using Daemon tools. I thought I was being clever at the time.
So I installed XP on the storage hard drive and booted into it. I couldn't format drive C. I tried partition magic, disk manager, right clicking the drive from explorer, everything. It wouldn't format. So I decided I would format it with the Windows XP installer CD.
So I booted with the XP cd and waited for it to load the installer. About halfway through loading, my computer crashed. Just cut off. I think the literary term for it is foreshadowing. It did this a couple more times, but finally it loaded (note I did nothing different. I just kept turning it back on and booting with the CD). I selected drive C and told it to format it. It starts formatting and halfway through it does the same thing. After a few rinse and repeats I finally got it formatted. It proceeded to try to install Windows XP, and I proceeded to tell it no by turning it off really quickly.
Now that my C drive was FINALLY formatted, all that was left was to boot into the fresh install of XP and install W7 from it. Only... now I couldn't boot into XP. I couldn't boot into anything. Not only that, but now my XP cd would not work. The occasional crash had now become a constant, and I had become very angry.
To my delight, I discovered while trying to make yet another Windows XP cd that my aunt's computer had a dvd burned. Being one to occasionaly learn from a mistake, I bought some dvds and burned me a W7 install CD. Hooray.
I installed it onto drive C. It crashed on the first attempt, but I was persistant. Then there it was. I finally had Windows 7 installed, and it was running perfectly! So I did the normal, installed basic programs first. Firefox, iTunes, utorrent, AVG, ect. ect. Everything was going well, but I noticed that for some reason whenever I would leave it for an extended amount of time, it would be off when I came back. Not hibernating or sleeping, just off. I checked the power settings and set it not to go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity (ridiculous!) but to no avail. Finally I witnessed the act that I've become so familiar with. Out of nowhere, poof! My screen went black and my tower turned off. After a few more instances of this I realized this was a bigger problem than I had realized.
So I started deducing things down. Whenever I restarted it after it crashed, it would ask me if I wanted to boot into safe mode. So I did. My reasoning was if it runs fine in safe mode, it's a software issue. If it crashes it's a hardware issue. Crude, yes, but it works. Nothing was overheating. I have thermal sensors running into the CPU, the GPU, and my Hard Drives. So I left it running for an hour (or approximately 5 crashes worth) and it did nothing. Just kept on trucking like any computer should do. I booted back into the normal OS and it worked for a little while, then same thing happened again. This lead me to believe it was a software issue.
If it were a hardware issue, my guess was that it was with the Hard Disk itself. I thought maybe I hadn't formatted it correctly or something. So I figured that a fresh install of W7 would cover both fronts. All my programs would be uninstalled and my hard drive would be reformatted. I put the disk in and told the installed to format my C drive (the first time i installed w7 from the CD I didn't do this since it was already formatted) and lo and behold it worked like a charm. I used it for a good few hours strait, and ran it through a couple of tests just to make sure it was good. Since it tended to crash more often when I was playing a video or moving large amounts of date, I extracted a 6.4 gigabyte rar and watched John Mayer: Where the Light Is DVD (just the John Mayer Trio part. That's his good music). All seemed well. Then I installed itunes. Boom. Crashed.
So have I found the culprit? I dont' know. I did a system restore back to before I ever installed itunes, but steve jobbs is an asshole and makes you install quicktime and bonjour and other things that didn't go away when I did the restore. Now the problem is back!
As of now my main suspect is itunes, but given that it has done this outside of the OS, I'm very skeptical of that. I'm trying to do another fresh install, but now my W7 cd is doing what my old XP cd was doing. It keeps crashing before windows will even load.
I'm in safe mode right now. I have been this whole time I've been typing this. I would copy and paste my system specs but it won't detect them in safe mode so here is the best I can remember:
My Mobo is a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R/UD3
My Graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 3800
My sound card is a Creative Audigy or something. I want to say soundblaster but I think that's wrong.
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor at 3.0ghz
4gb DDR2 RAM
I don't have many cigarettes left and once they're all gone I don't know how many more holes my wall can withstand. If you can find it in your heart to help me, then please, I beg of you, help me!
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