i own an older homemade desktop pc. its a amd athlon 550 with 512 ram, 300 watt power source, cd-rw/dvd, 200 gigs yada yada yada....

i know its not the fastest thing, but its all i can afford right now. my laptop is what im ussing right now, the desktop is just for music and movies.

the problem is that i have a hardware issue, and i cant figure it out. i can be on the comptuer, or not be on it, but it restarts at free will. the restarting isnt even the bad part, when it reboots, windows wont load and that all the drives wont start.

i unplug the power cord for 10 secs, boot it up, and 90% of hte time it works. am i looking at a new motherboard or waht? once its booted, everything works fine, but sometimes it says that "windows recovered from a serious hardware issue"

i want to build a new one, but money is the issue right now

Did you add any new hardware recently? Also, is the power supply old?

are you sure its not a virus i beleive the new sasser worm does something similar

no i havent added anything for about 4 months

wouldnt the virus be in the windows part though, because when i restart the comptuer even before windows loads, it tells me there is a problem loading the start disk

i dont know if sasser affects the boot sector ... its a possibility..

welp, time to reinstall windows...ill give ya an update later i guess

potential power supply issues, I say.

If it'* not a virus, then I agree with the PSU going bad.

check your voltages in the bios if you can, or use a multimeter to do so I had to part out my old 120psu because it wasnt putting out enough its 12v was more like 10.76v

What OS are you running on it? I had similar issues with my AMD and 2k (and 9 on it. I eventually rebuilt it new with all new drivers and the problem ceased. The PSU is still a likely canidate, as is the motherboard.