Whats wrong with my computer?

[Barry_G]

I bought my mom and dad a computer. Cheap one $800 with a $400 rebate. 2.6 ghz, 40gb hard drive, 256MB ram, cd burner/dvd-rom. DSL connection to the internet.

They use it for e-mail and playing games on MSN.com It has norton firewall, up to date virus definitions etc..

After 10-15 minutes of use it will randomly turn off and then restart.

I've ran ad-aware and spybot and it finds no problems. I've reformatted the hard drive and installed windows xp pro.

I bought a ups today and that was no help either. The computer is about 18 months old and the warranty is expired.

Any idea about what could cause this?

[IHateKeithSmart]

If you've reinstalled the OS, that would rule out viruses, spyware, etc. I would say you may have a bad power supply or possibly ram. Either is easy to replace, but it can be difficult to definitively diagnose.

[TheTROLL]

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I would say you may have a bad power supply or possibly ram. Either is easy to replace, but it can be difficult to definitively diagnose.

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This type of problem is a bastard. It's often the memory (try swapping out the memory sticks in turn to isolate the culprit), but could be just about any hardware component. Computers are too cheap now to spend days and days swapping out every component - just pick up another basic PC (and optionally sell the dud on for spares) /images/graemlins/frown.gif

[MyMindIsGoing]

http://www.memtest86.com/

Download that, burn, run. If it says your memory is broken, it is. If it is good, my guess would be the power supply. Just put one in from another computer and se what happens.

[Chief911]

I'd check the CPU temp at about 13 minutes. Possibly overheating and rebooting as a result?