Computer randomly shuts down. Help!

My computer randomly shuts down. I'll be in the middle of browsing the internet and my computer reboots. I'm using windows xp. Can anyone help me to figure out why this is happening?

Chaselang helped me out over in the spyware forum and I'm confident this isn't a virus, malware, spyware, etc...although it could be but I did everything required.

I'm thinking this is some sort of software conflict but haven't figured it out. Any help I can get would be greatly appreciated.

 

A virus of some sort would have been my first guess.

Is it only shutting down during Internet browsing, or does it do it during general use?


The most common causes apart from viruses are overheating, faulty RAM, or failing power supply.

 

This problem seems to only happen while browsing the internet. My girlfriends sister comes over and gets on myspace and it seems like every time she attempts to visit the site the computer restarts. It shut down when my girlfriends sister attempted to visit lyrics.com.

I have a ton of virus protection software and I did everything on the READ ME FIRST page. I'm not sure what else to do.

I was thinking of downloading firefox to see if IE wasn't the issue. Any suggestions?

 

Try Mozilla Firefox and see if the issue still occurs.

 

I downloaded firefox and the problem still persists.

 

See if it does it in Safe Mode with Networking?

 

You've probably covered this already, so this is just a stab in the dark: but could it be a heat issue? -either the CPU or Gfx Card? -I had a similar problem a while ago that I traced to a fan that wasn't running.