Hello gwenzors, welcome to Seven Forums.
I imagine it's because you have the incorrect Heat-Sink-Fan and correcting that will sort the issue, if you haven't burned up the CPU in the mean-time and don't forget to re-do the thermal paste.
An over-heating CPU will shut down a PC.
As I feared... you're probably right. Removing a stick of RAM and disconnecting one of the hard drives didn't help. But, when I changed a BIOS setting to make the heatsink fan operate only at the highest speed, the problem changed from shutting down entirely to freezing. So I think you're right and that's the most likely issue. Thanks for the help!
OK, some updates. Geez this has been crazy...
- I replaced the heat sink with a Corsair A50 (super nice!). Still had problems.
- I disconnected one of the HDDs (again) and was then able to complete the installation.
- I installed the drivers for my ATI card, thinking everything was OK, and switched out the Nvidia card I had installed with for the ATI card. Problems came back! (freezing/shutting off on startup)
- I reverted to the Nvidia card. Still no go. Windows startup recovery tool is citing bad drivers.
- Tried recovering from initial system restore points, no go.
- I changed a BIOS setting (HPET) to x64 as it had been set to x32.
- I removed my sound card (totally forgot I had one and it's super ancient) after reading that devices not certified for use with Windows 7 have been causing similar issues. Seems to have fixed the overall issue!
Now I'm working on getting my LAN connection to work (using an old Linksys hub, think maybe that's the problem?) and trying to get my other HDD that I had disconnected back into the game. So far that's causing a blue screen that disappears so fast I can't read it.
But the good news is that the install finished and my CPU isn't fried! Yay!
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