Computer crashes from watching videos
 

My PC works great except when I try to use a site like Veoh or Youtube. There's a chance it will randomly crash, freeze or reboot anytime during a video. As you can imagine this random crashing can be quite frustrating. There are a lot of possible solutions and I've tried several with no luck. If this has happened to anyone before I'd be grateful to know how you fixed it.

Such random outcome is probably related to overheating. Check your cooling fans and be sure that every one of them is working.

Huh? cpu overheating can go to a system force restart?
Ive tried memtest but there seems not to have any errors.. I didn't do a loob but I stopped at 1%..

Yup, it's a failsafe feature. Either that or your PSU is on its last legs. Also have you added any new hardware recently?

Basically put, hardware failure can cause a lot of random stuff. A lot. That's why it's so hard sometimes to isolate hardware problems. And out of them, overheating is the one I have found causing some of the weirdest problems (the winner in this area is obviously RAM corruption). I had an old PC that started overheating when a Radeon 9800 PRO arrived, and it caused a lot of unusual stuff, from buggy graphics to 30 second freezes, sudden restarts... Basically a ton of unpredictable stuff.

Edit: Sorry the reply was not for me so embarrassing....

Its funny I think I need a new heat sink any recommendations? Its lagging sometimes...

I did upgrade some things recently. Everything loads faster and my games have better graphics now but they lag a little more so I'm starting to think that my older hardware isn't working too well with the newer stuff. I'm starting to think buying a new PC is the simplest course of action.

Stop, wait. What did you add, gfx, tv tuner, HDD? Is your PC overclocked? What is your power supply ? brand and model pls. It could just be a simple case of not having enough juice to power all your devices.

Tell us what is your current system.

You say videos in those site. Does it happen to with videos you have in your pc ?

Yes, this happened to me too. I trashed a hard drive because of the power shortage :heh: So I'd recommend you check on that.

Yes the PSU maybe can't handle the new upgrade, what PSU do you have and post the entire specs

Videos on my computer work, sort of. The sound and video are out of sync for most of them and there's a little lag. It depends though. Claymore episode 1 has no problems, Claymore episode 18 has a second of delay, all Death Note episodes have 2 seconds of delay. Go figure. And, uh, I'll seem like an idiot for saying this but I'm really clueless with computers. As in I installed anti virus software and that's about all my computer survived with for 4 years. No maintenance, no cleaning up and deleting old data, nothing. The basics I know are that my computer was pretty powerful when I bought it a few years back. 2.8 Ghz, I recently upgraded to 1000 mb of RAM, 2 harddrives with 80 and 110 GBs of space with the second partitioned into two 55 GB disks... that's about all I can say. Right now I've been tweaking settings, trying to update some software, removing several programs, experimenting with stuff... no luck.

I'm not expecting a solution to magically appear especially the only information being these vague details but if I'd like to know how other people solved these sort of problems if they had them.

If it were corrupt RAM I'd think that it'd result in a blue screen (a memory dump in WinXP). Did these problems only start to occur after you upgraded your RAM? If yes, then we'll need to have you run MemTest86 to test for RAM corruption - it's possible that you've received a bad stick of RAM. Most companies will let you exchange for a new stick.

Otherwise, knowing that the system is four years old, it is possible that the PSU is dying. This is extremely likely if you frequently turn your computer on and off, and somewhat likely if you have essentially had it running for four years straight (especially if the PSU is a stock one - in other words, one that came with your computer).

Sites like YouTube don't really take that much processing power - especially not compared to playing clips on your computer. I immediately thought that it was a heat-related issue at first, but it seems a bit less likely given that regular video files won't trigger it. It's possible that your version of Flash needs a reinstall (someone feel free to correct me if YouTube and Veoh don't use flash-based players), or that your browser is suffering corruption. Does the system freeze/reboot regardless of which web browser you're using?

Another potential issue is that it's related to your network card/software. However, given that you've only changed the RAM recently, that's the most suspect component at this point.

This might just be the problem. Your PC was originally a premade one, or did you build it from scratch? If it's a premade one, my bet is that they threw a crappy PSU at you, and now it can't handle the new hard drives.

Be careful. My experience indicates that random variations, in and out, of power can get as far as burning a HDD. I'd say you take a look at the PSU and tell us what brand is it and how much power capacity it can handle. Also, full PC specs should help, too.

I thought that he was just giving his PC specs with regard to the 2 hard drives, and that the RAM was the only new thing. If the HDs are new, then it could indeed be putting a strain on the PSU.

corrupt ram n my experience = BSOD galore but randomly not in specific apps. (though that may just be me). Still though depending on the type of HDD (WD Raptors are AFAIK are the exception) HDD's are fairly low power devices, and ram isn't a major wattage eater either. But if you were already at the limits well you know what happens.

Simple diagnostic test, remove some optional hardware. like your secondary HDD if possible, bluetooth etc etc. See if your system runs any better.

But yeah give us a detailed list so we can at least do a rough calc on wattage requirements
1. your CPU (P4's, Celeron's are more power hungry than some other processors)
2. RAM config is it a 1gig stick or 2x512 sticks?
3. No of HDD
4. No of CD/DVD drves
5. No of fans
6. USB powered devices
7. Video Card and type
8. Other PCI slot devices
9. detals of your PSU. There should be a sticker on it saying what the voltage is across all the rails.

All these have to be accounted for. AFAIK very very few premade PC's had decent powersupplies from 3 or so years ago, they were mostly generic jobs with generally 250w-300w PSU's

I reinstalled flashplayer and some other online stuff, no random rebooting online for some time now. Perhaps it was a fluke but the chance of rebooting and freezing seems to have gone down. Now to fix the videos on the actual computer. Windows Media Player and Nero video player suffer from the same video lag and Quicktime refuses to even open. While I was typing this I downloaded bsplayer, a small video player meant to put very little strain on processing power. All the videos work 100% fine on it. I checked WMP again, same lag.

Sorry hobbes but I think you're expecting a miracle with those questions. >_>; At most I could answer 1 or 2 of them. *Tries to think of other stuff* Hm. Well, I did get blue screens from trying to play games so perhaps Ledgem is right about corrupted ram. When I went to see a guy to fix this problem he gave me a new video card and I picked up another 512 stick of ram with it. If anything it made the problem worse. Either he gave me a faulty video card and/or stick of ram or the comp is just too old (it's premade btw). And like you thought Ledgem the hard drives aren't new. I've been using them for a couple years now but I only partitioned one last week. The guy I saw did it so he could store all my data in one area while he completely reinstalled Windows on the other.

I'll be able to give more details in a few days, my father is on a business trip and he's been in IT for almost 30 years. He's more knowledgeable with software than hardware but he knows a lot more than me in both fields. I'll ask him about the specs when he gets back.

to rule out ram corruption d/l and run a program called memtest86. Let it run for an hour or so. Any errors should be shown up by this utility.

He gave you a new video card? What is it? Is it different to what you had previously?
(gfx cards are the most power hungry devices in your PC)