**A Troubleshooting Journey: Uncovering the Mystery of a Rebooting Computer**

I started with a seemingly straightforward task - to troubleshoot a computer that was rebooting unexpectedly every 20-30 minutes. The owner had brought it to me, and I was determined to figure out what was causing this issue. The first step in any troubleshooting process is to identify the symptoms, and in this case, the symptoms were clear: the computer would restart without warning.

I began by running a stress test using Prime 95 and Fermark, which are popular tools for pushing systems to their limits. This helped me determine if the issue was hardware-related or not. I was relieved to find that everything seemed fine - the CPU was not overheating, and the RAM was stable. However, I still couldn't shake off the feeling that something was amiss.

**The Investigation Begins**

Next, I decided to take a closer look at the event viewer in Windows. This log file contains detailed information about system events, including errors and warnings. By analyzing this data, I hoped to identify potential clues that could point me in the direction of the problem. Upon reviewing the event viewer, I noticed some unusual entries - kernel power failures and "disks were suddenly removed." These errors seemed suspicious, especially since they were related to specific game drives.

**From Hardware to Software Troubleshooting**

At this point, I realized that the issue was not hardware-related, but rather software-based. This made the troubleshooting process more challenging, as it involved delving deeper into system settings and configuration. I decided to perform a series of software-focused troubleshooting steps, including file repairs, registry fixes, and anti-virus scans.

One specific step I took was to run a System File Checker (SFC) scan, which is a built-in Windows tool that checks for corrupted system files. I also performed a Disk Check using CheckDisk, which is a free tool available in the Windows utilities folder. These steps helped identify potential issues with system files and hard drive sectors.

**The Fix**

After several hours of troubleshooting, I finally found the issue. It turned out that there was file corruption on one of the disks, which was causing the system to restart unexpectedly. By performing a series of repairs and fixes using CCleaner and other tools, I was able to clean up the corrupted files and restore the system to its original state.

**Hard Drive Scans and System Updates**

In addition to software troubleshooting, I also performed hard drive scans on both the primary hard drive and the secondary hard drive. These scans helped identify any potential issues with the hard drives themselves, including bad sectors or other problems that could be causing the system to malfunction.

I also made sure to check for Windows updates, as sometimes feature updates can introduce new system files that replace old ones. If these new system files are corrupted, they can cause a range of problems, including rebooting issues.

**The Aftermath**

In the end, I was able to identify and fix the issue with the computer's software configuration. The system is now stable and running smoothly, and I've been able to help the owner get back to using their computer without interruption.

As for future troubleshooting tips, I would recommend checking event viewer logs regularly to identify potential clues about system problems. It's also essential to keep Windows up-to-date with the latest feature updates and security patches.

**Conclusion**

Troubleshooting a rebooting computer can be a challenging task, but with persistence and patience, it is possible to identify and fix the underlying issue. By following these steps - from hardware troubleshooting to software-focused investigations - I was able to uncover the problem and restore the system to its original state.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis computer right here is a computer that i built right before the whole pandemic thing and shortage of parts and all that sort of stuff and now it's back in my hands because i'm being told that under a heavy load like gaming the computer shuts off let's try to find out what's wrong with this computer my name is chris this is coalition gaming and today i'll be your computer technician real quick if you're around here enter into tech pc hardware gaming stream tips and tutorials you're in the right place hit that subscribe button and that bell so you don't miss a single upload also i stream to twitch every friday at 8 pm pacific at twitch.tv coalition gaming crew so if you want to stop by and talk more computer tech stuff feel free drop a follow and let's talk anyways let's get back to the video so this is one of the ryzen 3 3100 builds that i did a while back i built this thing on stream and like i said if you want to see stuff like that make sure you head on over to the stream and i had used a spare rates prism uh cooler on it so that's why you see that on there and it's equipped with 16 gigs of ram and a super with a thermaltake 500 watt white power supply and you know i've generally have had good luck with these thermaltake power supplies but in the past i think i've had one fail but i've also had an evga i think it was a bq or one of their lower end sort of midnight madness specials for that or 500 watt also fails so but um thermaltake does kind of have a reputation on the lower end power supplies i thought this would be okay but let's find out if that's even the issue so first thing first let's power it on well it's powered on but it sounds like there's a bit of a grindy fan well that's something we'll address a little later the biggest issue is the shutting down if the fans are being loud or something like that well that's something like i said we'll address it later let's have a look-see well there's a problem right there immediately uh my windows security microsoft defender antivirus found threats uh yeah that's a problem okay so i'm just gonna remove the threats inside of windows defender however before this computer leaves my hands and goes back to the owner i'm gonna do a deeper virus scan on it to make sure that it's clean and good to go and that way that's not gonna be a problem for the owner so luckily this booted straight to windows no problem let's uh continue having a look i think a stressful game to play on this would be call of duty modern warfare it looks like it's on there so let's fire that up and see what happens actually never mind rip it has a patch and you know when warzone needs a patch you're in for it so let's just do my standard i'm going to run uh unigine valley with prime95 so that way we're stressing both the cpu and the gpu and see what happens from there a few inches later all right so it's all downloaded let's go ahead and fire it up i also have hardware monitor running so we can see what's going on with temps let's get prime95 blend going real quick all right so it's running we got processor at full load temps in the 50s so far in the cpu and if we scroll down here we don't need to see you uh 6060 super is 45 c right now so uh but the gpu isn't getting heavily utilized it's only at about 70 percent 75 percent all right let's keep an eye on that looks like temps on the gpu are perfectly fine though at about 50 and cpu is in the 50s so they're both hanging around there let's crank the settings though all right so i have prime95 running and valley running extreme hd 4k res whatever and we'll let this run for like 10 minutes and see what happens well it's been about 10-ish minutes maybe more actually and nothing i do feel a lot of heat coming off of it so let's check hardware monitor what do we got going on cpu got up to 74 which is fine especially on this ryzen cpu this this 3100 right and the gpu got to 74 as well which is perfectly fine so it's not temps let's see what else it could be let's actually try launching a game though so i found out what that clicking sound was it looks like the front uh grate is where the front mesh grille thing is rubbing on one of the fans anyways that aside uh i'll address that later let's load up warzone and we will have a look at how vanguard royale solos could possibly cause an issue with this computer considering that the issue that was reported to me was that it will shut down while playing games well warzone call of duty could be kind of stressful on the system so yeah let's play through it so far running around shooting getting in the action hasn't really made the system cut out yet i'm just hiding in a building right now still no real change i do feel the heat pumping out fans are doing their job um yeah let's keep on running around i guess so with call of duty being a successful test and not really finding any issue yet i don't really like to run furmark too often to stress the gpu there are other methods but hey i think it's time we try it now and here it goes we'll leave this running for like 10 or 15 minutes and see what happens a few moments later still going let's add prime95 to the mix and stress the cpu as well as a sanity check i put a kilowatt on it and then i put fur mark and prime95 to run again and i haven't seen it really go over 250 watts so maybe it still could be the power supply because whatever i'm doing isn't stressing it enough so trying to try to figure out what to do and stress it some more well after about 20 30 minutes of fermark plus prime 95 stress test everything is still good to go and yeah so gonna have to get more details from the owner regarding what they're doing specifically to cause the computer to reboot i looked at event viewer and there are lots of uh errors that lead to reboots in the event viewer of windows but still not entirely sure what's causing them so yeah like i said i need to get more details i'll get back to this tomorrow day two all right so now it's actually been several days later and it turns out it wasn't a hardware problem with the computer it turned out that it was a much harder to chase software problem and when it comes to computer troubleshooting uh ultimately hardware is the easy stuff to try to figure out and it's when you're chasing software problems random issues weird occurrences that things start to get a little tricky so one of the things that i did is i looked in the windows event viewer and i noticed there was some strange behavior i did notice that there was kernel power failure i think that's the name of the error there's a bunch of those but more importantly there's other errors and a lot of them say that there's disks that were surprise removed now if i'm being told that the issues that games specific games are crashing and i'm seeing in the event viewer that specific discs are getting surprised removed if games that are running off those drives are getting surprised removed that would explain at least in most part the issues that were that this computer was having so i set off to sort of fix windows essentially and i went from going from hardware troubleshooting to software troubleshooting and that including included doing a file repair via sfc scan now and check this slash f and slash r which is usually the way i like to do it and i did that across all the disks i also did file cleanups registry fixes using ccleaner where i installed it used it and then removed it anti-virus scans and it did find stuff and i i think between some level of uh file corruption that got repaired some level of virus issues that got removed and all that sort of stuff that something in there was causing the problems that this computer was experiencing because as you can see fortnite is just chilling right there on there i've already spent several hours troubleshooting gameplay with some specific games that were mentioned with this system and ever since i did those fixes everything's been a-okay one more thing that i want to add that i did was i perform hard drive scans because it has two hard drives and an ssd i perform hard drive scans and the scans also included any any repairs if any bad sectors were found fortunately both the hard drives passed and uh so again we're back to no issues with the hardware so i just continued with all that other stuff that i mentioned if you guys want more details about the fixes that i applied to get this going i will leave links down in the description to everything ssc scan now dism uh restore health command the check this stuff and and so on so look down description below if you guys want any more help on trying to maybe software troubleshoot your own computer another trick that i like to do when it comes to something like this is i check for windows updates because a lot of the time when there's a feature update available or a big major update that it replaces important system files that have possibly been corrupted and thus repairs the system in the process so something else to consider doing now this video didn't really go in the direction that i wanted it to or that i thought it was going to go in but in the end we got the computer fixed up and running and tomorrow i take it back to the owner so if you like this video you guys know what to do hit that subscribe button and that bell so you don't miss a notification and uh i guess i also streamed to twitch every friday i guess right no i do it friday's 8 p.m twitch.tv slash coalition gaming crew apm pacific if you found this video useful educational or otherwise helpful awesome let me know drop a comment down below how do you go about fixing computers with issues and how do you chase down problems when it's not the issue that you think that it's having let's talk about it drop a comment down below and or stop by the stream and we'll talk about it there anyways thanks for watching this video and i'll see you guys in the next one bye there's other videos for you guys to watch right there check out some of those videos some good stuff previous episodes of hardware hospital maybe um yes okay well i'm out peacethis computer right here is a computer that i built right before the whole pandemic thing and shortage of parts and all that sort of stuff and now it's back in my hands because i'm being told that under a heavy load like gaming the computer shuts off let's try to find out what's wrong with this computer my name is chris this is coalition gaming and today i'll be your computer technician real quick if you're around here enter into tech pc hardware gaming stream tips and tutorials you're in the right place hit that subscribe button and that bell so you don't miss a single upload also i stream to twitch every friday at 8 pm pacific at twitch.tv coalition gaming crew so if you want to stop by and talk more computer tech stuff feel free drop a follow and let's talk anyways let's get back to the video so this is one of the ryzen 3 3100 builds that i did a while back i built this thing on stream and like i said if you want to see stuff like that make sure you head on over to the stream and i had used a spare rates prism uh cooler on it so that's why you see that on there and it's equipped with 16 gigs of ram and a super with a thermaltake 500 watt white power supply and you know i've generally have had good luck with these thermaltake power supplies but in the past i think i've had one fail but i've also had an evga i think it was a bq or one of their lower end sort of midnight madness specials for that or 500 watt also fails so but um thermaltake does kind of have a reputation on the lower end power supplies i thought this would be okay but let's find out if that's even the issue so first thing first let's power it on well it's powered on but it sounds like there's a bit of a grindy fan well that's something we'll address a little later the biggest issue is the shutting down if the fans are being loud or something like that well that's something like i said we'll address it later let's have a look-see well there's a problem right there immediately uh my windows security microsoft defender antivirus found threats uh yeah that's a problem okay so i'm just gonna remove the threats inside of windows defender however before this computer leaves my hands and goes back to the owner i'm gonna do a deeper virus scan on it to make sure that it's clean and good to go and that way that's not gonna be a problem for the owner so luckily this booted straight to windows no problem let's uh continue having a look i think a stressful game to play on this would be call of duty modern warfare it looks like it's on there so let's fire that up and see what happens actually never mind rip it has a patch and you know when warzone needs a patch you're in for it so let's just do my standard i'm going to run uh unigine valley with prime95 so that way we're stressing both the cpu and the gpu and see what happens from there a few inches later all right so it's all downloaded let's go ahead and fire it up i also have hardware monitor running so we can see what's going on with temps let's get prime95 blend going real quick all right so it's running we got processor at full load temps in the 50s so far in the cpu and if we scroll down here we don't need to see you uh 6060 super is 45 c right now so uh but the gpu isn't getting heavily utilized it's only at about 70 percent 75 percent all right let's keep an eye on that looks like temps on the gpu are perfectly fine though at about 50 and cpu is in the 50s so they're both hanging around there let's crank the settings though all right so i have prime95 running and valley running extreme hd 4k res whatever and we'll let this run for like 10 minutes and see what happens well it's been about 10-ish minutes maybe more actually and nothing i do feel a lot of heat coming off of it so let's check hardware monitor what do we got going on cpu got up to 74 which is fine especially on this ryzen cpu this this 3100 right and the gpu got to 74 as well which is perfectly fine so it's not temps let's see what else it could be let's actually try launching a game though so i found out what that clicking sound was it looks like the front uh grate is where the front mesh grille thing is rubbing on one of the fans anyways that aside uh i'll address that later let's load up warzone and we will have a look at how vanguard royale solos could possibly cause an issue with this computer considering that the issue that was reported to me was that it will shut down while playing games well warzone call of duty could be kind of stressful on the system so yeah let's play through it so far running around shooting getting in the action hasn't really made the system cut out yet i'm just hiding in a building right now still no real change i do feel the heat pumping out fans are doing their job um yeah let's keep on running around i guess so with call of duty being a successful test and not really finding any issue yet i don't really like to run furmark too often to stress the gpu there are other methods but hey i think it's time we try it now and here it goes we'll leave this running for like 10 or 15 minutes and see what happens a few moments later still going let's add prime95 to the mix and stress the cpu as well as a sanity check i put a kilowatt on it and then i put fur mark and prime95 to run again and i haven't seen it really go over 250 watts so maybe it still could be the power supply because whatever i'm doing isn't stressing it enough so trying to try to figure out what to do and stress it some more well after about 20 30 minutes of fermark plus prime 95 stress test everything is still good to go and yeah so gonna have to get more details from the owner regarding what they're doing specifically to cause the computer to reboot i looked at event viewer and there are lots of uh errors that lead to reboots in the event viewer of windows but still not entirely sure what's causing them so yeah like i said i need to get more details i'll get back to this tomorrow day two all right so now it's actually been several days later and it turns out it wasn't a hardware problem with the computer it turned out that it was a much harder to chase software problem and when it comes to computer troubleshooting uh ultimately hardware is the easy stuff to try to figure out and it's when you're chasing software problems random issues weird occurrences that things start to get a little tricky so one of the things that i did is i looked in the windows event viewer and i noticed there was some strange behavior i did notice that there was kernel power failure i think that's the name of the error there's a bunch of those but more importantly there's other errors and a lot of them say that there's disks that were surprise removed now if i'm being told that the issues that games specific games are crashing and i'm seeing in the event viewer that specific discs are getting surprised removed if games that are running off those drives are getting surprised removed that would explain at least in most part the issues that were that this computer was having so i set off to sort of fix windows essentially and i went from going from hardware troubleshooting to software troubleshooting and that including included doing a file repair via sfc scan now and check this slash f and slash r which is usually the way i like to do it and i did that across all the disks i also did file cleanups registry fixes using ccleaner where i installed it used it and then removed it anti-virus scans and it did find stuff and i i think between some level of uh file corruption that got repaired some level of virus issues that got removed and all that sort of stuff that something in there was causing the problems that this computer was experiencing because as you can see fortnite is just chilling right there on there i've already spent several hours troubleshooting gameplay with some specific games that were mentioned with this system and ever since i did those fixes everything's been a-okay one more thing that i want to add that i did was i perform hard drive scans because it has two hard drives and an ssd i perform hard drive scans and the scans also included any any repairs if any bad sectors were found fortunately both the hard drives passed and uh so again we're back to no issues with the hardware so i just continued with all that other stuff that i mentioned if you guys want more details about the fixes that i applied to get this going i will leave links down in the description to everything ssc scan now dism uh restore health command the check this stuff and and so on so look down description below if you guys want any more help on trying to maybe software troubleshoot your own computer another trick that i like to do when it comes to something like this is i check for windows updates because a lot of the time when there's a feature update available or a big major update that it replaces important system files that have possibly been corrupted and thus repairs the system in the process so something else to consider doing now this video didn't really go in the direction that i wanted it to or that i thought it was going to go in but in the end we got the computer fixed up and running and tomorrow i take it back to the owner so if you like this video you guys know what to do hit that subscribe button and that bell so you don't miss a notification and uh i guess i also streamed to twitch every friday i guess right no i do it friday's 8 p.m twitch.tv slash coalition gaming crew apm pacific if you found this video useful educational or otherwise helpful awesome let me know drop a comment down below how do you go about fixing computers with issues and how do you chase down problems when it's not the issue that you think that it's having let's talk about it drop a comment down below and or stop by the stream and we'll talk about it there anyways thanks for watching this video and i'll see you guys in the next one bye there's other videos for you guys to watch right there check out some of those videos some good stuff previous episodes of hardware hospital maybe um yes okay well i'm out peace\n"