My guess would be that the power supply might be flaky/  The "Fssst" may be
a capacitor arcing and this may in turn bring the power good signal down,
which then causes a reboot of the system.

Try replacing the power supply to see if the problem goes away.

Mark C. Barron
A+ Technician

At 19:14 3/16/02, you wrote:
>Hi all.
>Over the last few days my new PC has begun spontaneously rebooting -
>sometimes after a few minutes running, sometimes an hour or so.  There
>doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, it just flips out to a black
>screen, then restarts.
>
>This new machine has been running reasonably well for the several weeks
>since I finished it, it's the just the last couple of days it's started
>this silliness. It's done it twice while I've been typing this, so I'm
>having to save the message every dozen words or so.
>
>The PC has an AMD 1800+XP with 2x 256 DDR PC2100 ram on a Gigabyte 7VTXH+
>mobo, 133FSB.  Power supply is 320W P4 rated. The mobo has the latest
>BIOS. GFX is a GeForce2 Pro 32Mb.
>
>I'm running a 52x AcerCDRom and a Liteon 24102b writer. HDD's are a
>Seagate UDMA2 8Gb and a Maxtor UDMA6 40Gb. There's also an NEC 100Mb zip
>drive and FDD.
>
>The only thing I've added in the last week is a Promise UltraATA100 TX2
>IDE controller card, which I first thought was the culprit.  However, I've
>now got the HDD's and CD's running from the onboard IDE's, with the zip
>disconnected, and still the problem persists.  The only thing I haven't
>done is to pull the Promise card out of it's PCI slot and uninstall it.
>That unit has the latest BIOS, too.
>
>Immediately prior to a reboot, there's a little 'Fssst!' noise, very brief
>and only audible because I have the PC alongside me on the desktop with
>the side off the case.  I noticed the LED on the underside of the Maxtor
>would flicker along with the sound, so I pulled the Maxtor also, thinking
>it might have been that HDD, but it still does it with just the Seagate
>and the CD's connected.
>
>(it's done it twice again in the last 5 minutes)
>
>Other factors? - I'm using PC-Cillin.  Local power is stable. W98SE. IE 5,
>OE 5.5. Don't run ZoneAlarm or any other monitoring apps.
>
>Suggestions will most appreciated.
>Ian Porter
>Computer Guys
>Arrowtown
>New Zealand
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>
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