My primary Windows machine is glitching. This morning, it woke up dead. Or rather, I woke up to find it in a zombie state, with power on but no video signal. I couldn't even do a hard reboot.

I shut it down for a while, than powered it up, at which point it booted. For a few minutes. Then mouse and keyboard froze, and I had to power down again. After repeats of this, with different applications running, I came to the conclusion that it's a hardware problem, most likely some component on the motherboard overheating. The fan seems to be running all right, but the CPU seems like the most likely suspect to me. Are there other reasonable possibilities? It's really bad timing, because I've got some data on that machine that I need for some deadlines today.

I'm posting this from my Fedora box.

[Update at 9 AM EDT on a rainy south Florida morning]

I managed to get it up just long enough to drag some files over to the other machine, but I suspect it will be a long slow process in continuing to reboot it until I get everything I need. I really need to set up a nightly cron job to automatically back up to it.

[Follow up at 11:22 AM EDT]

In response to questions in comments, the cabinet is open, the fan is running (though I don't know it it's at an adequate speed), and the (Athlon XP) processor is running at its default speed of 1.8 Gigahertz (no reason to overclock this machine--I just use it for office work).

It's now gotten to the point at which I can't do anything useful with it--it bluescreens shortly after logging in. It's been fragile for a while, often locking up or bluescreening randomly, or occasionally right after boot, but whatever the problem was seems to be coming to a head. I'll try swapping out fan/CPU, because that seems like the most likely source of the problem. I've been wanting a faster processor anyway. But probably not today--no time to mess with it

Your probably right about the systemboard.

Before replacing it, I'd also try pulling the memory and reboot, to see if its memory related.

It could also be the power supply. Low probability there, but I have seen that symptom from bad juice.

Either way good luck.

If it runs ok for a few minutes before it starts malfunctioning, it could be a heat problem. Maybe just your CPU fan.

Funny enough, something similar happened to me this weekend. My computer spontaneously rebooted. No power surge, and I checked the power cables and they were correctly plugged.

But now, every time I try to boot it, the computer reboots itself whenever it gets to the "Window is Starting" screen.

I swapped the RAM and it didn't help. The hard drive checks out fine. The IT guys at work think it's either a power supply issue, or a motherboard one.

I had this problem a few months ago. It is definitely a heat issue. Try getting into your bios and see what your processor clock speed is set too. Mine was set at max and changing it to manual cleared up the problem.

Otherwise, your fan may have died on you. Check your cooling and if you have a cpu cabinet then make sure to keep the door open when the PC is on.

Another thing to try (for file recovery, at least) is to leave it off for a while, and then boot using a Knoppix CD (or similar). Different OSes have different power usage patterns - and some minimilistic OS may be able to boot.

Regarding getting your files off the machine: If the hard drive isn't damaged, you should be able to connect it to any other Windows machine to get the files off. Also, if it's formatted FAT, you should be able to connect it directly to the Fedora machine.

Before you do anything more drastic, download and burn the ISO image of memtest86 and boot from that CD. This will tell you if your problem is RAM, which is what it sounds like to me from what you describe.

I don't need the files so badly that I want to pull drives yet. I'll check out the memory issue, thanks Jeff.

Had the same symptoms last month. Replacing the power supply fixed it.

My wife's 2 year old Dell laptop (w/ AMD processor)experienced similar symptoms a few months ago. It would crash. Once it sat idle for a while, it would boot up and then crash again, with the "up" time getting progressively shorter until it would not boot at all.

I disassembled it; could not find anything that looked problematic. Re-assembled it and it worked ok for 2 weeks and then it repeated its crash sequence.

Repeated disassembly/re-assembly process this time it worked for 2 days before dying.

I took it apart again and smeared the processor assembly (not an encapsulated chip, but a die bonded to a substrate with a metal cap that mates to a large heat sink) liberally with heat sink grease. Put it back together and it has worked without complaint ever since.

Don't know if desktop version of the processor is constructed in a similar way, but I thought I woould share my experience.

Good Luck.

How's security? A customer with "reasonable" security recently had two WinXP boxes die after an unidentified malicious agent (no logs kept) progressively killed both systems. He had to reinstall, then he had to call me to get his wireless back.

If heat is a problem, you might want to try Artic Silver transfer compound (see http://www.crazypc.com/articles/hsfinstall.htm), and maybe an extra case fan. What are your cpu and system temperatures when failures occur?