you might try putting that ram stick back in. First thing I'd recommend in spontaneous rebooting problems is removing and reseating all installed components and cables. Parts are sometimes subject to strange oxidation problems, and reseating them will often times restore their function and end your problems. Also, blow out the ram slot with a little air before you replace the stick, dust and such..

If you have more than one "stick" of RAM in your system, even minor variations in RAM specs between them can cause problems. I have had similar problems at least a half dozen instances over the past ten years. Every time I was able to fix the problem by taking out the "mix and match" RAM (i.e., RAM from different manufacturers) and putting in identical RAM purchased from the same manufacturer at the same point in time.

Check your power supply, too. I know when I bulked my system up to 960 gigs of hard drive, I had a couple spontaneous re-boots. I put in a bulkier power supply and haven't had any issues since.

Kentwolf:

My little Compaq Presario in 1998 had a 4GB, I have since bought an 8, 15, 30, 40, 80, 120, 120, 200, and a 200. The 4 is now a paperweight, the 8 and 15 stayed with the old Compaq, the 30 is a Graveyard of backups, and the rest are in my current homebuilt PC, with the last 200 connecting via a Pyro firewire box.

We shot a very good high school choir's travels through Europe last summer, and brought back nearly 60 hours of video. The resulting DVD is 2 1/2 hours (split over 2 disks) with about an additional hour of "bonus" video and a "Director's commentary" audio track.

I'm sure that there are some folks on this forum who can very easily beat the 800GB number, probably by several times over. My wife claims that whenever I feel the need to buy something, I bring back a hard drive from Fry's.

Regarding the comments about the rebooting: given the number of disks, it certainly could be the power supply; however, all I know is that the system has been rock-steady for 24 hours now. The RAM stick, incidentally, was generic, and I am overclocking this PC by 10%. Gosh, maybe there really IS something to this business of "Certified" RAM.

I'd love to see the video...any samples posted anywhere?

I'm actually working on a 2 DVD set myself, on an americana style band from Iowa...A full live show (20 songs) an acoustic set, a full length documentary, and a bunch of other special features.

Thrillcat:

Hmmm... I've never done that. What do you do--encode portions to a super-compact format, such as Windows media? I don't have a web page, so where would the video be hosted?

Yeah, you just render them as 256k (or so) Windows Media files, or any other streamable compressed format, such as QuickTime, Windows Media, etc.

Not having a website, however, limits where you can put them. There is a site called www.vegasusers.com that has a video sharing section where users can post video clips and get feedback from other Vegas Users. Neat little site. No frills video sharing.

You could post a clip or two there. The regulations and guidelines are on the site.

On the rebooting.... could heat be a problem (particularly given your overclocking?)

I've got an AMD XP 2000+ , and it runs a bit warm. A couple of times, really pushing my machine, I've had heat problems. Like over the weekend, I had the heat turned up in my apt., and got 4 blue screens in a row (on a usually very stable system). Temp monitor reported CPU was over 60 degrees. I opened the case, turned it off for a few minutes, went right back to what I was doing, and had no problems.

Greg

I have to agree, sponatneous reboots is usually a problem with heat. Open up your case and put a fan blowing in there to see if that solves the problem. If it does, might want to look in getting a bigger and cooler tower to keep your system in. Id reccomend the Thermaltake cases. My system runs 20-30 degrees cooler since I switched it from one of the little mid-tower cases.

Just blew out my CPU cooling fins with some canned air and my crashes similar to the old "blue screen of death" and spontaineous reboots dissappeared. It just started yesterday but thanks to this thread In solved my problem. Thanks you all.

That's what makes this whole PC thing so interesting to me--there could be a number of reasons why things crash, and it takes a bit of detective work to sort it out.

It's now been 48 hours since I pulled out the second 256MB RAM module, and the system is rock-solid, even with some pretty heavy rendering. So in this instance, it looks like that RAM module was a bit tender.

As for CPU temperature, there was a thread on this forum in the past few weeks. My AMD T'Bird is running between 45 and 50C, according to MotherboardMonitor. AMD says these chips can get MUCH hotter (90C!) before failure, but that's the actual die temperature, not some thermistor reading temperature from nearby.

Everybody's situation is different, but in my case (ouch), I have a half-dozen drives in my generic Enlight PC case. All I have for cooling is a standard-issue fan/heatsink on the CPU and the power supply fan pulling hot air out of the case through the power supply grille in back. That's it. Again, temps are surprisingly moderate.

I suppose if I were located in Florida or Singapore I would have to pay more attention to cooling, but up here in Oregon we need to put on sweaters much of the year.

I also expierienced the bad memory thing on my wifes PC last month, it took me week to figure that one out (with a little help from a friend). pulled the bad stick out and everything installed smooth as silk. The bad memory lead to nothing but problems in installing new apps on my wifes PC and the spontaneous reboots discussed here.