PC Dropping off

My PC XP has been sulking. The first daily boot goes through to finish only to shut down within irregular periods. Can be immediate on clicking any desktop icon or as far out as one/two minutes…..just goes to black shuts down. Today went to blank blue, kept running so closed it out manually. Thing is, when it’s restarted, usually once, all is fine.
Boot.INI time out is the only adjustment I made several days ago, from 30 sec’s to Zero. This prob began the morning after what appeared to have been a good mod, so put Timeout back to 30 sec’s. Honest, haven’t touched anything else!!
What say, please?

 

Could be lots to look at considering you haven't mentioned any maintenance. Such as:
1. cleaning out the chassis of dust
2. cleaning for unnecessary files and folders
3. clean up unnecessary registry entries
4. disk check before defragmenting

 

Thank you. I run CCleaner weekly. Run the machine "clean" as in clean office, just me, smoke free. No dust. Use defraggler after CC. Use Malbites and run AVG. Hope this info assists.

 

Generally speaking; black screen = hardware. Issues like reseating RAM boards, securing HD cable connections, leaky capacitors, micro cracks in solder connections being influenced by heat, PSU issues, and more.

Blue screen = software. Issues like system files corruption, bad updates, program conflicts, (esp. with anti virus), malware, recently installed software, and more.

So on the latest boot, what is the result?

And have you tried booting into safe mode? Machine make/model?

 

Well, it's behaving itself just now. Probably doesn't like bad language! Started up perfectly today. It's a custom built machine, 3 partitions, 250g. Pentium. System is 82% free. Quite fast. Not used for games. Just one thing, it's saying it's found new hardware....RAID Controller. Where would that have come from? Haven't allowed it to install. Get rid of????
Many thanks.

 

Don't get rid of it. One of my computers did that. I went into device manager, right-clicked the RAID and selected something like disable from detecting at startup.
But I'd like to get rid of the dialog box that comes up on every boot up wanting to install the "new hardwear," it's found. How can I delete please?

 

Great, many thanks. Disabled it in Dmngr.