My computer reboots, seemingly completely at random, about once every week to two weeks but has occasionally gone months. It just goes from running fine to the POST with no error messages or anything and doesn't seem to be due to heat or usage as it's happened a couple of times when the computer has booted just a few moments ago and is idling. It's been happening for as long as I've had this computer, almost two years. It's happened in both Vista and Windows7.
I strongly suspect it's a hardware problem. But due to the rareish and random nature of the crashes my normal strategy of just removing hardware until the problem stops isn't really practical. My guess would be Power Supply, Ram, or Motherboard. But I just don't know how to test an issue this random and want to figure out how to confirm which it is before I go replacing things. So is there some software or hardware that can be used to test these sorts of errors? I did run memtest86 for about 8 hours without finding any issues. And the power supply is more than capable of running my system.
Best Answer
It certainly seems like a hardware issue.
The first course of action would be to test your ram. Memtest86+ is a widely used diagnostics tool for RAM. I suggest you leave it running overnight or longer and see if it reports any errors.
If your RAM seems to be alright, you can try running a CPU burn-in tester to see if your processor is alright, if it doesn't produce strange faults.
If that doesn't produce any errors you could try to replace your BIOS battery. I have seen examples in which an empty BIOS battery somehow made a system instable. It's also a cheap solution.
My last guess would be the PSU. Replace it with any decent and recent model and test RAM and CPU again.
A note: if you test RAM, leave as much hardware out as possible.