so on a ~5 year old HP desktop with Vista, the computer cannot STAY on for longer than 10 minutes, not even in safe MODE. it simply resets, goes into "Windows did not shutdown properly" message at the boot menu. i've checked all vents, everything is clean and there is enough thermal paste on the cpu, and the fan is working. do you guys think a fresh install of windows 7 would solve this easily? if not, what can the problem be? thanks!







Any changes before this occured? Have you tried going to BIOS setup only and let it stay there for more than 10 minutes? How about removing all hardware such as RAM sticks, hard drive, video(use onboard)/sound leaving the mobo, PSU connected to a monitor only? Then introduce each component on each power boot.Good morning Cobra and welcome to CH

I do believe that Jason is getting you on the right road. In my past experiences that error you are getting ends up being a couple of different things. I am going to list these in the order of highest failure to least failure.

#1... PC's memory either 1 or multiple stick failure.
#2... Video CARD memory failure
#3... PCI card failure. This can be a modem, NIC, Sound card etc.

I would download and test your memory http://www.memtest86.com/. Just download memtest and burn it to an ISO. Download memtest (http://memtest.org/). Burn it to a cd using a dedicated .iso burning utility (http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm), make sure the cd drive is at the top of the boot order in bios, then boot to the newly created cd and run the utility.

If the memory has even 1 error than the stick is no good. This can take hours to complete. If the memory pass then just like jason2074 stated I would remove all add-on cards to see if issue is gone.

Hope this helps you. Please let us know how you make out, Mike

Download BlueScreenView:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html
unzip downloaded file and double click on BlueScreenView.exe to run the program.
when scanning is done, go to EDIT - Select All
Go to FILE - SAVE Selected Items, and save the report as BSOD.txt
Open BSOD.txt in NOTEPAD, copy all of the content, and paste it into your next replyno changes were made, ever. thanks for the info, gentlemen. i will try all the methods mentioned and get back to you.so i ran the memtest, it passed, no errors. also ran a hard drive test, it passed those as well. it had a ton of failures on the video stress test, though.

and this is what bluescreenview found:

Quote

...
#1... PC's memory either 1 or multiple stick failure.
#2... Video card memory failure
#3... PCI card failure. This can be a modem, NIC, Sound card etc...

#2