For the past few days my computer has been freezing and then rebooting itself every few minutes. The screen would sometimes look as if it's heaving and fluctuating. A friend of mine suggested it could be the PSU (power rails dropping out). Any other suggestions out there before I go get a new part or parts to fix it?

When mine did the same thing, it was, indeed, the power supply.  Once I put a new one in, no more problems.

thanks hon...hopefully that will fix it once a new one is put in.

hugs,
Rain

Rain, what character are you using for your avatar?  If you look at mine, which is a character of mine I'm getting ready to submit here, you can see the resemblance.

that is daz's ethereal beauty i think it's called. comes with about a dozen of face morphs and this one's my fav. i think it's wonderful to be able to create new morphs for vicky, maybe someday when am not too busy playing i will too lol.

depends on a few things. Does it happen in or out of Poser?

These can be all sorts of things, hardware or software, or even both.  Also depends on the Operating system.

I had a problem like this, and it turned out to be dust buildup on the processor and internals. A few good puffs of air made things better. Cheap, and worth a shot.

Another thing (depending on the OS), there are ways to boot and create (or capture) a log file of what loaded (or didn't) as you come up to operational. Doesn't mean much unless you're a techie, but if you even contact tech support, it will put you a few pages ahead on the troubleshooting guide.

Just keep an eye on when it happens, and what the last successful thing you did was. If it happens a few minutes afterwards of booting up, it could be heat-related. Hope this helps.

Can you give some details on what kind of hardware and software you have?  PC or Mac, what operating system, what processor and wattage of power supply, what kind of video card etc?  Does it ever give you any kind of alarming dialog box?  Is there anything like a pattern of events that you can see that comes before the crash e.g. during rendering, moving files or the like?  To me, your crash problem sounds like it could be caused by a lot of things:
overheating video card (I've had this happen and it can make the screen go haywire like you describe)
failing power supply like already mentioned, or possibly its wattage is too low to drive all the hardware bits you have installed

Those are the two big items imo, but it really could be a lot of things.  If you are running Windows XP, you can try looking in the Even Log (Start Menu -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer, and look in the System log, or possibly Application) ... look for Errors (red circle with a white X in it).  Maybe you can find a little information there.

Before I do anything I would BACK UP just in case this problem is going to kill your PC.
Maybe, maybe not, but I wouldn't take the chance of losing everything.

^^ yeah, that would be a smart move!

Check your operating temperature, too. Could be your fan and/or heatsink is failing. Or your fan may not be up to the job if you're really working the machine hard.

Sounds like the power supply or something loading the power supply.  Before you buy a new power supply, you can try disconnecting and/or removing any devices you don't absolutely need.  i.e network card, modem, CD/DVD drive, external devices.  I had my wireless Ethernet device shorting out my USB port on one system.  But the power supply is a common failure item and the most likely culprit.  It's always good to have a spare one. 

thanks very much for the suggestions everyone, i have written it all down and will have someone look into it and see if they can find the problem. i really appreciate all the help. for now, i am going to need a lot of luck lol. thanks again!!!

I agree with Power Supply.  I had the exact same problem when I installed the supplied program disk for my CyberPower 525SL power supply.  The update didn't fix the problem either.  After rebooting, the system would get to Windows and start a non-stop cycle of reboots.  When I was able to get into Safety Mode, I could get back in and uninstall the suspect software.  I'll never buy another power supply by this manufacturer.  I've had nothing but problems with it.  Now it's on it's last leg and I hope to get one by a known company.

Have you installed any programs lately?  Sometimes this can be a problem, or some hardware issue as others have mentioned.

not really aside from the regular daz purchases. it runs alright in safe mode and the freezing stopped. we managed to clean the fan, remove programs i don't use and so far it is running alright and hasn't crashed as much as it did. although the screen still flactuates every once in a while but and i'm not really ready to create a complicated scene using vue with it just yet because i'm afraid it might die on me before i could save it lmao. but so far so good...let's hope the little hiccups would go away in time. thanks very much for the suggestions hon...i really appreciate it a bunch!

hugs,
Rain

I'm really surprised no one has touched on this, but my hunch is that your Operating System is infected badly with a virus.

I've had more than one machne display the symptoms you've mentioned.  And whenever my PSUs have died they went all at once, and right at the beginning/end of a boot up/down.

Luckily, Virus's are a lot cheaper to fix than a new PSU.  What you need to do is finish off(delete) the current OS, and re-install.
 
There are two ways to look at this.  First is that most viruses only infect your OS.  So, just replacing the current OS files will usually fix everything fine.

Two, while you're up to reinstalling the OS you may want to just delete everything on that hard drive, which will insure the death of any/all virus'.  This entails FDISK'ing(Delete everything), Re-Formatting, and Re-Installing Windows.  I've become a Pro at this, as most of my buddies, friends, and neighbors tend to wonder over to too many adult sites, and/or eat one too many cookies, after they've had a PC for a year or two.  The mall charges $80, so I get $40 to do do it for someone else.  It can all be done within an hour, but I generally take the machine over night as sometimes you'll need to go surfing around, to the PC's Manufacturers website, to DL drivers after the installation.

A Work Around these two methods is to put the OS on it's own partition(Sofware Drive,) or physical drive, and your application files and Runtime on another partition of actual drive, becasue your machine will never mix the files on two drives So, when this happens you wo'nt need to go fishing for stuff to backup, before you just FDISK the whole OS drive.

Generally, just re-installing the new OS over the first one works fine.  It's quick and easy, but you can never be too careful. 

WinXP makes all this really simple, just pop in the disk, from you desktop, click click Install Windows, and then in the next window click the drop down, and select New Installation.  Else(If you've tried to use the machine one too many times without doing this and ca'nt get to your destop even in Safe Mode,) you can just put your Windows XP disk in before booting.  When the computer restarts you'll be asked to click any button to boot from CD, or just be at a at a blue screen.  If neither happens you'll need to reset you BIOS to Boot from CD.  It will soon ask you you to pick a partition to install to.  There is where you will also have the option to delete(FDISK) he partition(s.)  If you do you will then need to Create a new partition from that same place.  When WIndows gets around to asking you how you want the drive formatted, tell it NTFS(Windows NT FIle System)  Then just sit back, and let it figure out what's what in your PC.  IT'll ask you what you want to name your PC, for a new password, and maybe a couple other things, but nothing too tough.

After re-installation I'd advise the addition of a Spyware Proection before anything else.  If you can't afford one there are some free ones around, just ask.  My McAfee Privacy Service comes free with from Comcast and works great.

wow...i did think about a virus as a possible culprit but i guess i tried to brush it off lol. i will have my honey read this tomorrow when he wakes up and see if we can look into this. thanks very much Angeluscuitry - lotsa hugs to ya!

I once had a computer that did exactely this. And it was the CPU fan that had stopped working. Once it was replaced, everything worked again.

But yeah, it could be a virus as well. I wouldn't reinstall the OS though. An antivisus program should be able to fix it. Reinstalling the OS is a last resort IMO. (too effin bothersome to reinstall all your programs if it's not REALLY needed)

Another recommendation is to get a good piece of backup software.  I did two things when I put in the new drives this year.  I backed up my Windows install to a CD (clean install - Windows only) and I bought Norton Ghost.  I do backups of my C drive, my D drive (my 3d applications drive), my E drive (my 2d applications drive) and my J drive (my Runtimes drive).  All of these are backed up weekly to an external hard drive specifically for this purpose with a separate partition for each drive backup.  This way I never have to reinstall my programs since all the registry information is in the C drive backup.

My backups are done weekly - the C drive on Sunday morning, the D drive on Monday morning, the E drive on Tuesday morning and the J drive on Wednesday morning.  Since these are all incremental backups the only thing written are any differences.  This is where Ghost is absolutely the best.  It makes one base backup (a full one) and each backup after that is incremental.  I learned a long time ago that this is just something that has to be done for PC health.  My virus scan runs every night, my spyware every morning and the defrag every day.
It's a little inconvenient but with the amount of time and money I have in this machine, it's worth it.

Here is a new wrinkle.  When in SAFE mode, there is no problem.  This seems to rule out the power supply and video card issues.  However, a full scan from Norton Anti-virus revealed no issues there as well.

The registry has been cleaned out and anti-spyware run. 

It could be a corrupt file in some non-vital (not loaded in safe mode) area of windows, but how to narrow it down?  A re-load of the OS would result in the loss of non-replaceable software that has been lost over the years. 

Any thoughts on ways to narrow down the culprit?

On two different computers I had similar issues lately. In one case it was a hard disk slowly giving up, the problem became increasingly more prominent until the hard disk gave up completely (the faulty area fell in the swap file), a new hard disk fixed the problem. In another case some faulty memory was the problem.

Always run a memory tester when problems are persistent (for Windows Microsoft has a memory tester somewhere on their site, do a search). It might take a while to run a full test but it does eliminate one cause of problems. It is my experience that memory timings may change over time.

In general problems like these can be hard to track down but the culprit is often a broken power supply, a video card problem, a faulty hard disk, faulty memory, a broken CPU, some other broken component, a virus, damaged OS (about the correct order). Remember the broken component might not actually be in use, just loading a driver for it might already cause the problems.

Do a memory test. Next unplug everything that isn't absolutely required (printer and all other external components), also take out all extra hard disks and only use the minimal amount of memory. If you still have problems you'll have to find somebody with some spare parts and start swapping until you have a stable system (continue swapping until you have eliminated all but one cause).

along those lines; you can add more physical memory, and also see how your 'virtual memory' is setup. It's in Start, Settings,Control Panel, uh...dangit..I have Win 2k here. Could have an answer by Monday..:| don't worry, someone else will know.

when you get there, you can expand Virtual memory, but make sure you don't go too high (not more than the amount of Physical memory, usually). If you do, it will start using the Hard Drive as 'memory', and it will feel like you hit a brick wall..;)

Aside from the the OS software being infected, the Format on your HDD could also be slipping.    When was the last time you Defragmented your Hard Drive?  When files are defragmented, a computer need to spend time spinning the disk to find each part, and that's casue for heat and wear.

To my experience Ant-Spyware works much better as a deterent than a fix.   Once your machine shows symptoms that's it.  I've never been satisfied with a machines performance after it's been infected, regardless of what anti-spyware, or registry clean I then install to clean up the mess.   Maybe, because re-install works so much liek a like a charm, for restoring system performance.

You right about your Window Programs and Settings they will all be lost.  I bet you could make a Ghost of your current disk(With OS included,) and restore with that after an OS re-Install, but I doubt it would be easy, or very inexpensive.  Nor would tha guarentee the infected files would be removed.

I do know Windows comes with a utility to transfer Programs etc from an old PC to a new.  Do you have a second PC lying around?.  Else, you may think of grabbing a $50 Cheapo Desktop from eBay.  Then you could make the transfers; re-install the OS on the Good PC, and transfer everything back?

Safe Mode is'nt anywhere you want to run your PC from.  You only find yourself there in an Emergency.  It's there to just give you access to files, you need to backup, and then an easy avenue to an OS re-Install(No BIOS)  You ca'nt Add/Remove programs(Registry), the Video Display is crippled, and probably some other stuff.  My guess is if you go on using your PC, from there, it too will eventually crash, and then not give you a backdoor to your files.  In other words do'nt think of using your Safe Mode on a dialy basis!

My suggestion is to bite the bullet this time, and then next time learn to live with OS re-install, and reorganize your workflow to to deal with it(i.e. extra drives and partitions)  Or get your hands on another PC.  I never throw my Setup files away, they're backed up into each install directory, across my Application Files drives, on DVD-R after DVD-R, and on XDrive(In case the house blows up!)

Working fine in safe mode does not eliminate hardware issues.  The drivers for much of your hardware is not loaded.  Portions are either not running at all or at reduced features in safe mode.  This can easily be the case with a video card problem.  i.e. Works fine in safe mode, goes bonkers when using 3D acceleration and all that memory.  A dead fan or bad memory chip on a video card would actually behaive this way. 

UPDATE:

we replaced the video card with an older one we had laying around and guess what - yep, the freezing stopped and it's now semi-working. i still need to upgrade it though but for the time being i am happy that it has stopped freezing. many thanks to you guys for pitching in with suggestions! big hugs to you all!!!

Sounds like it was probably a power or heat problem. When you replaced the card, did you notice that there was a lot of dust inside? You can get a can of compressed gas and solvent for cleaning computers (or get one from a camera store which just uses a squeeze bulb), and that can really help. If you've upgraded your machine, you might get an additional fan. (I was having the same problems you were, and eliminated them by aggressive cleaning and an auxilary fan.)

yep, i think that was part of the problem and was the first thing we did. it helped a bit but the freezing problem persisted but since we replaced the video card it's been working alright. just need to get an upgrade for it because it is an old video card we had laying around. thanks very much for the input =)