Spontaneous Restarts, could be HD? CPU? or MB?

[Shadow]

And adding onto my previous post, it must take a big amount of dust because the family pc has lots of dust in it.

[Travis Dane]

What's 'lotsa' dust? Also, Can't dust transfer eletricity? At least
when in large amounts?

[TravisS]

'lotsa' dust is a TON of dust. I have worked on computers in back-woods shacks that have litteraly had 1/2 inch thick dust covering the bottom of the case, PCI cards, and other horizonatal things. I have opened up cases just to watch dust pour out.

A little covering of dust, like little dust bunnies and such, generally won't do any harm to anything but the crappiest of fans and bearings.

[RoD]

dust can short it out, for once hes not 100% nuts, ive seen it too :P

[Xei]

Well he decided to purchase a new CPU fan and heatsink, and he got mad and told his original PC vendors that he wanted to know the problem. This is what they told him:

PC Vendor:
"We checked the RPM of your CPU fan and it was 3000 rpm which was causing the CPU to overheat. The RPM became lowered due to the power that the Video Card was consuming. So we put in a new ThermalTech Volcano 8"

Anyways, Before he took it into his vendor I checked his CPU fan RPM and it was 5000+. I have never heard that an AGP slot could drain excess power from the MB, in fact there is supposed to be a maximum voltage that they can supply! (IE. PCI is 2.2 volts I think) Plus the only difference from the ThermalTech fan is that it has greater air flow, a new fan wont improve the RPM(in most cases with limited power). I dont know, but I think that his vendors either didnt tell him the real problem or else he didnt understand what they said.