Machine Reboots After Latest Release

Sigh, I just don't know what to do about this. Here's the problem: If I run SL for 10-15 minutes,

-the screen will go blank
-the screen comes back on with the PC rebooting itself
-after a little while, the screen turns into a pixelated mess and the machine appears to have frozen

Now, this started happening after the latest release. It also happened right after the introduction of 1.8.1(?). But that was only briefly. LL released another client that same day and, after I installed it, my problems disappeared. However, they reappeared with this latest release.

I seem to be able to avoid this problem by running another intensive application such as Photoshop at the same time as SL and switching between the two VERY often. If I forget myself within SL for an extended period of time, the machine will almost surely reboot itself.

Since the PC is pretty much in order, and this problem only appeared immediately after I installed the latest client, I suspect that there's something going on on LL's part. Does anyone have any thoughts, suggestions about this?

Here are my specs:
Dell Precision Workstation 530, Win2KPro, Xeon 2GHz, 1GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 6800GT (latest drivers, I have this card for a year now, never had any problems, I have adequate power supply and even keep the CPU cover open as of late just in case). SL is run on high settings (minus local lighting and a couple of others) - I'm afraid to go in there and check 'cause it might freeze and I'll lose this post

Edit - Here are the settings I run SL on: graphics card memory 256mb (as recommended), cache 1000mb, no local lighting, no shadows, draw distance at 160, object, tree, avatar detail at 100%.

That sort of hard lock/video corruption/reboot problem usually means either overheating, power supply problems or bad memory chips. Unless SL is tickling a very bad driver bug I don't see how it can be anything other than hardware problems ...

Dell ship good parts so unless the power supply is actually failing it's probably not the problem. Opening the case doesn't necessarily help, it may just suck more dust in .... check around the CPU/GPU and see if there is much dust under the fan or around the heatsink.

You might want to take it to a PC supplier or shop and get them to look at it, they may be able to help? Maybe somebody else has more insight. Good luck!

My PC restarted itself with SL because of overheating, try moving it into a more open space, or taking the casing off, or pointing a fan at it, or preferably, all three. See if it still does it..

Ok, so I wake up this morning, I look up the responses to this thread, I log on to SL and, sure enough, like clockwork, within 10 minutes, the machine reboots itself. I come back to the forums, and I happen to see Steve Linden's post in this thread (the thread is about occassional lockups - not quite the same like my problem, which is super-frequent reboots/lockups, but nevertheless similar). At any rate, Steve Linden suggests trying three things to help LL determine the source of the problem. So I decide to give these a shot. First I try the third suggestion. No results. Then I try the first two. I reduce graphics card memory from the recommended 256 to 128 and I reduce max bandwidth from 1000 to 500. Log off. Log back on. That was 1 o'clock. It's 11 now and I'm still up. So so far so good, all seems to be ok now but - I mean - what the hell.

Just posting here that I'm going to forward the info to Steve. If you haven't already, please do Before/After tests with the Maximum Bandwidth and graphics card memory to see if that's the source of the problem. If you can keep reproing it and your machine keeps restarting if you set memory and bandwidth back up to 256MB and 1000 kbps, that's a good sign! Thanks.

Yes, this is it Torley. I just raised graphics card memory and max bandwidth to the original levels - 256 (recommended) and 1000 - and, after 22 minutes, the machine rebooted itself and then stalled exactly like before. So I'll be sliding these down to 128 and 500 for the time being. I had absolutely no problems with these settings all day today - teleporting, staying in laggy areas, attaching things, etc. Thanks for being on top of this. Let me know if you need any other info or before/after tests.

Well, honeymoon is over. I'm back to crashes. Though of a more random nature this time. At least before I could sort of predict them and log out before the system did it for me. Now it's "SURPRISE!!!, why don't you take a little break and come back after 15 minutes?"

Dang. That's too bad, Rick. I let Steve know all your info... is it possible at this point for you to test with another graphics card at all?

Also, see what happens when you run a RAM test... use a free utility like Memtest86.

One other thing I was wondering about, are you on a router?