This has been a problem that has been becoming increasingly frustrating the past 2 weeks from when I first observed it. My computer screen will just go black, and a few seconds later I get this weird boot up screen informing me of my PC doing some sort of surge protection, mentioning an unstable power supply unit. I've observed this happening when playing assorted video games, when playing a certain online flash game (Crusaders of the Lost Idols), the third instance is described in paragraph #3 and #4.
Upon doing my own research, it seems like two possibilities are most common. One, my power supply is not sufficient for all the hardware I'm running. Two, my fans are dirty and need cleaning. My fans were dirty and I cleaned them nice and good, but it just doesn't seem like my hardware is overtaxing my power supply, I have 500 Watts and I only have 1 CPU and Video Card installed. Plus I've run the PC for close to a year without incident prior to this.
Now, I have a third idea of what's doing this, but I'm not sure how plausible it is. I have a 128GB SSD and a 1TB SATA, all my system files and such are installed to the SSD while everything else is supposed to be on my larger drive. I noticed my SSD was full to the brim, mostly because when I first got my PC, I was being careless and putting all my downloads and such on the SSD. It was such that if I tried to view a picture stored on the SSD, it would tell me something along the lines that there isn't enough memory to view the photo and that I should try clearing some space.
Curious, I tried opening it again and the PC immediately crashed just like it had been doing before. Upon booting back up I deleted a bunch of crap from the SSD, now I can view photos again, and so far no crashes. I'm thinking maybe that the drive being overfilled was possibly inhibiting my PC's performance in some way. Is it possible that could crash my PC in such a manner?
Upon doing my own research, it seems like two possibilities are most common. One, my power supply is not sufficient for all the hardware I'm running. Two, my fans are dirty and need cleaning. My fans were dirty and I cleaned them nice and good, but it just doesn't seem like my hardware is overtaxing my power supply, I have 500 Watts and I only have 1 CPU and Video Card installed. Plus I've run the PC for close to a year without incident prior to this.
Now, I have a third idea of what's doing this, but I'm not sure how plausible it is. I have a 128GB SSD and a 1TB SATA, all my system files and such are installed to the SSD while everything else is supposed to be on my larger drive. I noticed my SSD was full to the brim, mostly because when I first got my PC, I was being careless and putting all my downloads and such on the SSD. It was such that if I tried to view a picture stored on the SSD, it would tell me something along the lines that there isn't enough memory to view the photo and that I should try clearing some space.
Curious, I tried opening it again and the PC immediately crashed just like it had been doing before. Upon booting back up I deleted a bunch of crap from the SSD, now I can view photos again, and so far no crashes. I'm thinking maybe that the drive being overfilled was possibly inhibiting my PC's performance in some way. Is it possible that could crash my PC in such a manner?