[ILUG] [OT] Unexplainable crashing

[Carolan Goggin]

Okay, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with Linux, I'm afraid.
What's happening is that my computer is crashing a few times during the
day, but especially in the evening when I'm online.  The computer doesn't
freeze or anything, it just suddenly restarts for no apparent reason.  It
sometimes does this when it is unattended, sitting silently on its own.  I
don't know what's wrong.  The computer is a home-brew so I have no-one to
complain to.  It worked fine for a few weeks, until I brought the computer
to the RDS for the Young Scientist exhibition.  It may have got a knock or
something, but I checked that everything is in position and all the wires
are plugged in right.

I originally thought the problem was to do with the fan in the power
supply, and I still think that could be the problem.  I have Genesys Health
Monitoring software on my computer, and it tells me that my system fan (the
one in the power supply) is not spinning.  So I looked at the fan, and it
seemed to be spinning, but much slower than it should be spinning.  So I
checked in the BIOS, and it said the fan wasn't spinning too.  I took the
power supply out and sent it back to where I got it.  They sent me a
replacement fre of charge.  I put that in.  It seems to be spinning much
faster, and the air coming out of it is much cooler, but both Genesys and
the BIOS still think it's not spinning.

Now the computer is _not_ overheating.  I have checked this and set my
monitoring software to warn me if it overheats.  And it's not overheating.
Definitely.

One thing I did notice is that it doesn't crash in Linux as much as it does
in Windows.  I know this is only to be expected, but it hasn't crashed in
Linux for weeks (certainly not since I got my new power supply) whereas in
Windows it crashes about every half hour.  This is partly because I haven't
left the computer running Linux for a full day at a time because of
problems I'm having with X (which should be solved when I get Mandrake 7.2
- thanks Ruairi!).  Would it be possible that this is a software problem
rather than a hardware problem?

Anyway I am completely at a loss.  I need help.

Love
Carolan