random pc crash, ran out of ideas

[Ark]

So here's my predicament:

My pc randomly crashes, when I do random things. Windows disappears, then I'm looking at the boot screen. No BSOD, so no luck finding an error code to look up and event viewer shows nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing is overclocked.

Its a Pentium4 cpu 2.8GHz (prescott) and the temperature reads 51.C under load and idles at an average of 45.C

GPU temp sits at 30.C
Northbridge temp is 34.9 average

Here's what I tried so far.

Swopped the cmos battery, swopped the power supply, swopped the memory, fresh windows installed, updated all drivers, no luck so far.

Doesn't matter what I'm doing on the pc, it crashes every 10 to 20 minutes.

Any ideas?

[SykomantiS]

How is the power in your area, do you have a ups you can use to test with clean power?
Also, it's a rather old system, right? What are the capacitors on the board like? Any of them swollen or popped? I've had an issue like this way back- was the caps that died on me.

[Ark]

The power is good. My flatmate has his pc on 24/7 and he has no issues.

I looked at the caps thinking the same thing. They still look good, and amazingly enough they're still shiny

[Ron2K]

Hmm... when it restarts, how long does it take before the next crash - another 20 minutes, or shorter? If shorter, it could be a heat management issue, but could also be a hairline crack on one of the motherboard traces - which sadly, you'd expect from an old board.

[Ark]

I actually got a suspicion its the main hard drive. After one of the crashes I noticed it didn't show up in the bios screen. I hit reset and it showed up again, without opening the case and playing with cables.

The crashes are at complete random times. Sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 20 minutes. The weird thing is if I'm not doing anything (just staying on the desktop) it doesn't crash at all. I'll grab a magnifying glass and check out the circuits for breaks. I imagine it'll be rather hard to spot if there is any.

[SykomantiS]

This might not always be the case, but usually when a drive is on its way out, you'll notice a faint click and spin-up sound- if that is the case then bye-bye hard drive.

Do you have any corrupt data or requests to run check disk when the pc restarts?

[Ark]

None at all. I'm gonna fresh install on a different HDD tonight just to be sure. Watch this space

[Ark]

Ok I found the cause of the problem. There was a few raised capacitors I missed... tears

Sooooo... Anybody got a Socket478 with a 800MHz FSB mobo to donate? :'(

[SykomantiS]

It is sometimes possible to have those caps replaced, depending on what and where on the board they are located, you wanna give it a shot.

[Ark]

Its among the 5 large caps by the cpu. Was actually busy reading up on that just now

[wizardofid]

Hey ark have a board for you. pm or sms me

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboar ... 008974.htm

[THE_STIG]

Its among the 5 large caps by the cpu. Was actually busy reading up on that just now

I have replaced capacitors of quite a few motherboards. There are people who explain exactly how to do this as there is a bit of a trick to it if you dont have the fancy equipment to remove the components, have a look on youtube there should be a tutorial somewhere