Hey. I wanna thank all of you in advance. I am new, obviously, and I have been searching for a place that will help me and I think I found it. Ok now cutting to the chase. I recently purchased a lot of computers parts and built one.

I know the basics but not everything. My friend was the one who told me what to buy and built it. He can't figure out what the problem is, so I came here. My computer keeps on restarting out of NOWHERE!. I don't understand why.This is what I have

video card: all in wonder 9600 xt
mother board:SY-P4I865PE Plus drangon 2 v1.0
processor: 2.8ghz ht
1 gb of ram

My friend did all the updates, os, etc etc. I don't know what is it. You see originally we thought it was the video card but it wasn't. Then I thought it was the processor because he didn't pull down the clips since it would bend the motherboard. I am not a computer guy but I am guessing it is the power supply or motherboard. Please help! Thanks

What is the operating system? XP?

"restarting out of NOWHERE!" from where? Can you boot into Windows?

btw: (if your processor wasn't seated right the machine wouldn't even start)

do you know the specs of the power supply? Is it sufficient for the system?

I have windows xp pro

Yes it boots to windows and I can play games etc. it sparatically restarts and it pisses me off.

About the power supply all I know that it is an antec 300w power supply

I have a log that I have kept of when it has restarted. It has restarted normally during e-mail, during gaming, during internet and during nothing.

Sounds like a hardware problewm to me. First port of call I think is heat. How is the ventilation in your case. Can you install something like MotherboardMonitorPro to see the temperatures or else look in your BIOS immediately after a crash.

If the temps seem OK then the only course of action is to try and change components one by one to see if it imnproves. These are really difficult things to track down.

I am guessing that it is the bios of the motherboard or something. I went to the website of my manufacturer, soyo, and saw that some motherboards if not updated will restart automatically or sparatically. I hope it is not a hardware problem. My only guess would be the motherboard and/or the power supply. I don't think it is heat. Why would it be heat? I have played farcry full blast for about an hour and nothing has happened. I have turned on my computer just to read e-mail and BOOM it does it. hmmmmmm

OK, if you can play Far Cry for an hour then it is probably not heat. I think you've got a component on its way out then. Never heard of a BIOS causing a reboot but it never does any harm to be running the latest firmware. What are your 5V and 12V rails showing in the BIOS?

You should have plenty of power @ 300w.

Is there an available update for the BIOS?

To get a more detailed error message you can do the following:

You can turn off the feature that instructs XP to autostart on system
failure. Right click on My Computer and select Properties->Advanced
Tab->Startup & Recovery section->Settings button->uncheck "Automatically
restart" Apply. This will give you a blue screen with info on it and you
will have to manually restart the computer. The info might give you an idea
whether or not the problem is hardware or software related.