Woe!

Yesterday I woke up to find my computer had shut itself down suddenly, and
wouldn't come up. I was fiddling about with power cables last night and it
suddenly came back up!... But then it shut itself down again after about an
hour.

Any idea what could be causing this?

4 responses total.

Power supply not putting out enough power?  Do you have a spare you can try?
Capacitors going bad, if the board dates from 1999 or later, at least a few
years later.  See www.badcaps.org (com?).  The bad capacitors are power
regulators and were made with a defective stolen formula for the contents.
We fixed three boards by replacing capacitors, speeds 600-800MHz.  Eventually
companies stopped using those bad caps.  Sometimes they spontaneously reboot
after a voltage drop.  Sometimes they won't boot at all.

www.badcaps.org brings up a phpMySQL login page.

But I also suspect the power supply. It might have some broken wires.

Thanks. The computer still comes back up every so often, so i took the
opportunity to run a stress-tester which found no errors. Don't know how good
it was, though, as it was free and it only runs for max 15 mins in the free
version. Was about to run it again when the computer shut down.

I also suspect the power supply. Unfortunately I don't really have a spare
to test it.

Make sure your CPU fan is still running and isn't all gummed up with 
dust. 

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