PC failure sensitivity (no viruses)

[Salluz]

Edit: no viruses, or at least none that I know of. I hardly ever download, so there should be none.

My computer's shutdown sensitive, but it may be a hardware problem since it shuts down as soon as the room temperature drops below room level. I think it's because the lower part of the house has been cold all winter, which may have erred the PC hardware to some degree. I have to put a heater fan about two or three feet away from it in order for the PC to stay on. If not, the computer will shut off without warning, and without a blue screen!

All errors have been fixed (according to the system). The computer's sensitivity has become this way gradually. At first it would shut down with a blue screen warning, followed by a reboot. Then it began to shutdown more and more. Before I restored my PC it would cut off without warning as soon as a USB device was plugged in. Now that I have studied my PC's patterns, it shuts off when the temperature changes. I guess that the weather has made it temperature sensitive.

[phill]

First, open the command line and run 'tasklist /svc >> c:\tasklist.txt' and either upload tasklist.txt somewhere and post a link or post the contents here if its not too long. svchost.exe is a host process, as it say, it is suppose to manage services running on your computer. The number of svchost.exe running at any given moment depends on how many services you have and how the services are started. You will generally have one svchost with a low PID and a number of services attached to it and a number of others with higher PIDs and a few services attached to them.

Now, generally speaking, low temp is not usually a problem, hence why cooling a computer with liquad nitrogen tends to speed things up. It kinda sounds like your motherboard is failing you, and since you describe a relation to temp changes, it may actually be a physical break somewhere on the board. Are you lucky enough to still be under warrenty?

[prophetik music]

pressure changes can affect a bad motherboard, depending on what the capacitors are made of.

for what it's worth, that looks like approximately the correct number of svchost.dll files you should be getting. xp only uses about five, but that's through process explorer, not task manager.

I have to put a heater fan about 2 or three feet away from it in order for the PC to stay on.

this horrifies me. i've never heard of an issue that needed external heat just to keep the computer on.

can you tell us what the bluescreen errors are? that'd help a lot.you might have to tell your motherboard (through the BIOS) to keep the computer on after an error (aka, no auto shutdown).

[Salluz]

I would tell you but I forgot the blue screen error messages. Nowadays it doesn't even give me the BSOD and the whole system just dies. Probably a motherboard issue.

[DarkeSword]

svchost is a generic process used for a lot of different stuff. It's not uncommon to have a ton of them running in Vista.

Prophet is right. You need external heat to keep your computer running? Sounds like your hardware is on the fritz.

[Salluz]

Ah, okay, it figures. I didn't want to hurt the software system so I left it alone, but it's probably more of a problem when you see more than one program running that aren't basic system applications requiring more than one function in order to work (mouthful).

As for the shutdown problem: yeah, I think that I'm screwed. I talked to a Live Assistant, took his advice (power drain) and I'm still having problems.

[prophetik music]

yeah, svchost does for general services (like networking and dns client) what rundll32 is for dll files (like audio and video drivers).

power drain doesn't solve anything that might cause this - it's for whenever your mobo is like half-bricked or something. i don't know why they'd suggest that. maybe it's just cause it's an eMachines computer =)