Haven't been doing any GIMPing lately, as my computer keeps crashing on me. I have a Gateway (now you know why it keeps crashing, lol), and every once in awhile, it reboots itself. Have Googled and researched it, but can't seem to find the culprit. Not fun being in the middle of a project, and having your computer crash, and lose your work. Anywhos, that's pretty much why I haven't been around much.

Hope you find the problem soon or can come up with another solution.
Here's hoping for the best out come for you.

Thanks sallyanne, appreciate it.

I have never had a Gateway last very long. The hard drive crashed on the first one, the motherboard went bad on the last one. Happy now with my macbook, hubby is happy with his home-made PC.

It's not been a very good one, that's for sure. Hard to complain though. I have a father in law who's a computer nut, and he's given me almost every computer I've ever owned. The last one I had was an ACER. It was a dang good pc, but lightning got to it.

We use a strip with a circuit breaker, but still, I think a near lightning strike would fry right through a strip.

If the strip has surge protection it should be okay. Luckily I've never had this confirmed, but that's how most of those strips are designed to function.

I hope you are right, we get a lot of thunderstorms in northwest Ohio!

My pc is plugged into a strip. Actually, I'm not 100% certain lightning was the culprit. We went out west to Yellowstone, and a bad storm rolled through where I live. When I got back, it was fried, so I'm ASSuming it was.

I just had a power supply fail on my computer. The power supply light would come on and so would the light on the mainboard but the fans wouldn't spin and system wouldn't boot. I always keep an extra PS around to test with, so I removed the cables that connected to the mainboard, propped the new PS on the side of the PC and connected its cables to the mainboard. Plugged it into the wall, flipped it on, pressed the PC power button and BINGO, the system fired right up. Your old acer might have a bad power supply.

The power supply is usually the fist thing to go on a computer and a flaky PS can cause all kinds of strange problems. I had a PC come into the shop that booted up and worked just fine with the mouse, but when you hit any key on the keyboard, it locked. I swapped out all the internal cards, RAM and nothing helped. I was thinking it was a bad motherboard but as a last resort, I connected another power supply and BINGO, it worked perfectly.

The first thing to do with your Gateway is to unplug, remove all the cards and the RAM, then reseat the cards and ram into their slots to ensure they are all making a good connection. You also might be having a heat issue with your Gateway. Remove the fan from the CPU heatsink and clean underneath. It's common for a layer of dust to buildup between the fan and heatsink and cause temp issues. It doesn't take long for the layer of dust to buildup and look like a piece of felt on top of the heatsink. Compressed air can't really get this off unless you remove the fan. Even after removing the fan, you still might need to use Q-tips properly clean the heatsink.

Bad RAM can also cause your PC to lockup and/or reboot. There free apps to test your RAM.

Incorrect BIOS setting can also be a problem but good mainboards can usually detect the auto configure the settings. Sometimes, the CMOS can get corrupted and you can reload to factory settings from inside the BIOS (or jumper the CMOS clear pins for a few seconds on the mainboard or remove and re-insert the CMOS battery).

It's really best to build your own PC using a generic case & power supply, then keep some spare parts around to swap out when needed. Sometimes, the only way to troubleshoot is to use the process of elimination and swap out parts, one at a time, until you find the culprit. Hopefully, you find the problem before you determine it's a bad mainboard (or a bad CPU). Modern CPU's rarely fail, unless they overheat. It can happen but they will normally shutdown before they fail.

Corruption in the OS can also cause the PC to reboot. Having a spare drive to reload the OS is useful, as well. Hopefully, some of these suggestions will help with your troubleshooting.

Jeez GT, speak English, haha. All kidding aside, thanks for the heads up. I have read about a few of the things you mentioned.

Honestly, I think the flux capacitor is going out.

or
grab a hammer (the kind Thor used) take your frustration out on your instrument,then do what I did,go to a pawn shop .buy one for $100.00

All those things Tux said and maybe overheating. I had several machines get really upset with summer temps in Oklahoma. If you got a lot of graphics intensive stuff going on, your video card might be getting too hot as well. Something to look into. If you smoke or got pets that shed whole other pets, look for hair on the little fan thingers. You can maybe salvage that with some tlc and a Q-tip.

I tell you what 99.9% of the time for me it was the heat sink. Like Tux explained remove the fan (4 screws) and clean under it. Replace, reboot, and try and see if that works. Hair from my dogs is constantly messing with my machine..

Typical culprits: power supply, and CPU heat sink / fan (and heatsink/fan on the graphic card if you have one). Install some temperature monitoring software and see if your CPU is above 60C when idling. AMD CPUs run hotter than Intel ones.

ofnuts, do you know of a good temperature monitor I can get in Linux?

Hi molly,
I use "gkrellm" which is available in all Linux distro's.
You 'll have to config it but that's simple and self explanatory.
Gerard.

If you are using KDE then there is one such widgets for the system bar of the Plasma workspace. I assume there would be similar one for other desktops.

Thanks, I will check, I use MATE desktop

Yup; CPU, power supply, memory, or video card, but, if you have a modem card, it could be the modem too since you did say you got hit by lightening when you were gone.