I just recently upgraded my computer to a mother board, a processor, memory, and hard drive that my friend gave me. I am now running windows xp sp2, have a 300gig hard drive, p4 CPU 3.00GHz, and 768MB of RAM. When I first got the motherboard. He told me that he just couldn’t get it working. I found hardly any heat sink compound between the CPU and heat sink. (I fixed that) Then I noticed his 400W power supply was dead and I am currently trying to use my 250W pwr supply. I also noticed that everything in the case was getting hotter than my last components. So I just added a case fan, which seemed to help also. My problem now is as I am doing something the entire computer will just shut down for a moment the restart. It will continue this cycle until I can turn it off and let it set over night. The next day I will get a few hours out of it then the process starts all over again. How do I go about to even troubleshoot this problem. My assumption is that the CPU heat sink and fan (which seem fairly small and not really keeping the temp down like I want) and the pwr supply need to be replaced with bigger and better ones to fix this problem. Thanks if you can help.
