Thread: Lockups
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Archduke Tips Archduke Tips is offline
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Old Dec 18th, 2007, 11:10 AM       
I don't think you should discredit overheating so quickly. I had a peltier board cooling my CPU that stopped working and experienced a very similar problem to what he is describing.

You have to think a little bit about thermodynamics here. When the ambient temperature is significantly cooler than the temperature of the overheated component, it will cool rapidly. It still takes the part a very long time to get back to ambient, but it should drop from overheated (which we know is a VERY high temperature) to an acceptable temperature in a matter of seconds. Especially if you still have a giant heat sink sitting on top of the CPU whether or not the fan is going.

Loading the OS is extremely CPU intensive, I don't know why you think it isn't. You are accessing the CPU 100% of the time until it finishes loading the operating system and then all the extra crap you have running in the background. If you have an overheat issue, it is hard to tell exactly when it will crash because it varies depending on your cooling system (and how it failed), the CPU you have, how you have windows setup, and what other software gets loaded on boot. Video games are only more intensive on the computer because they also use the video card and sound card resources.

It's such an easy issue to check that there is no reason to just write it off right away.

Now maybe I was a little hasty in saying that it probably is not a software issue. After you confirm that it is not heat, you might want to try what MetalMilitia said and do a clean install. If that doesn't fix the problem, then you know it is hardware. I can think of a few memory issues that could cause a restart, but 90% of the time you are going to get a blue screen first.

Last edited by Archduke Tips : Dec 18th, 2007 at 01:01 PM.
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