this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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Is this a new problem?
If so what was the last change made?
Does it happen under heavy load or does it happen when idle or both?
Does the OS restart or it it a total power loss?
Yes a new problem, started just a few days ago. I haven't changed anything as of late; last one was installing a game about a week or so earlier.
OS restarts, no errors or anything.
If there are absolutely no errors in event log before the restart, PSU really is a top contender. The system will have had no warnings of any kind. If the PSU stops delivering adequate power, it's likely to restart, and this is at a low level (i.e. the motherboard restarts the system).
It's difficult to diagnose too. For mine, I was able to get more-or-less consistent restarts by requiring more PSU current by putting the system under heavier load. Once I saw the restarts occur as fans / drives / GPU were spooling up, I swapped my PSU. That was the issue.
The good news is that (well-made) PSUs usually fail in a way that won't damage components. And yes, even good PSUs can fail, especially if they're being used above their rating. And even the best PSUs don't last forever -- best practice to change them out every few years, in any event.
Maybe faulty ram? Pull out all ram sticks but one and see if it happens again if it does swap ram sticks until it doesn't.
If that doesn't solve it it may be a failing PSU or other major component like the GPU or HDD.
A good starting point is removing everything not needed to boot and slowly adding them back again until it fails.
Those were my ideas as well. Here's hoping it's the RAM because I could work with less and don't have the money for a PSU replacement.
Yeah, PSU is my top guess based on what all you've said. My next step would be to swap to a test PSU to see if it behaves, but since that's not an option for you now, testing the other things people have suggested is worth a shot and can't hurt.