Compaq Presario S5000NX restarting

[jdgunderman]

I have a Presario S5000 NX, it keeps restarting. It will keep restarting for a week or so then it will not do it for a while, then it will start doing it again. I bought a new heatsink and fan reapplied thermal paste. I don't get any blue screen even though I disabled it. I have not installed anything new. Any ideas what this could be? It does it if I am playing a game or just reading my mail. Thanks

[davy]

Keeps restarting could be a hardware problem or possibly due to something overheating, the power supply can also create this problem.

We need to isolate the problem, the next time it happens nip into bios set up and check the supply and CPU temperature, thats all we are doing just checking as this may provide a clue to the problem... the voltages can be about 0.5V higher than stated but never more than about 0.3V lower, the CPU temperature has gotta be within bounds obviously.

Just to throw some light, I had a machine that kept freezing, sometimes rebooting but only when I was doing something important like typing an urgent text document... having tried a new power supply I thought I'd cracked it butr lo and behold the problem was soon back.... turned out to be a faulty hard drive and I found it by lobbing another one in, it had Linux on and the wrong mobo drivers but it proved the point.

You might check when the fault occurs the hard drive is being recognized, I helped to repair a Dell which kept rebooting, mind you this did it all of the time at 'power up' ... a clue was had by disconnecting the hard drive when the machine booted happily into bios, which it wouldn't do with the hard drive connected, the case was proven when a new drive was formatted. With no hard drive connected you should get an error message similar to, 'Hard drive failure', 'No hard drive found' or 'Please insert the disc with the operating system on' this indicating the bios is OK, the first step is the bios booting when you power up, then after the bios checkout it'll hand control over to the CPU when data is then loaded into RAM.... do check the IDE leads by replacement because they have been known to cause problems as well, also boot viruses can create havoc as well as a corrupt MBR segment.

Davy

[jdgunderman]

When I do check this I only get 1 temperature. It says only 1 fan is working. I know I have the fan on the heatsink and it is working(I just replaced heatsink and fan). In the back of the power supply I feel the fan blowing out air. I also downloaded Speedfan these are the readings I get. Fan1 2733RPM Fan2 0RPM Temp1 46c Temp2 82c HD0 34c. VCORE 1.58V, +3.3V 3.38V, +5V 5.11V, +12V 11.78V

[davy]

The voltages look ok to me, fan 2 is puzzling if there is no rpm this could be because there is no taco pulse on the fan to sense the rotation speed for this it's gotta have three wires on it, the 'hall effect' sensor as it's known could be faulty, this senses the magnetic pulses as the fan rotates which is then sent to the mobo for counting and display... the only thing here I guess is to try the fan on another machine or try a new one, I don't use speed fan gizzmos so I can't really comment.

So the next best thing, and more important I guess is to worry about the temperatures, if these are right then there isn't anything to worry about the fans, after saying that the mobo could be sensing a no fan situation but this would happen as soon as you powered up so think I'd say this is nothing to worry about, the temperatures are more important than the fans rpm.

As a idea, why not use the computer as normal waiting until it plays up, then continue rebooting and using.... but with the side panel off and see how it goes, if it's a temperature problem then give a few minutes it should run even cooler with no side panel on, but you'll have to allow a few minutes for the inside to cool in spite of maybe having to reboot a time or two while it's cooling off, all this would tell you that some component isn't happy mind you, if it was corrupt data due to some driver conflict or a virus even it wouldn't know if the case is off or care about the temperature and may provide a clue.

davy