Classic overheat or BAD CAPS symptoms.
Random reboots and BSOD’s often occur more often than not with older machines when:
[ol]- Routine maintenance such as using Canned Air and replacing the cpu paste was never done.
- BSOD’s are known to cause data corruption when multiple events such as the above occur due to repeated heat stress. Ergo, a program such as avast! can be adversely affected (corrupted) by a sudden stop and multiple forced shutdowns of a system as it is a program that runs all the time on a system, unlike, say, MS Word.[/ol]
Signs of heat stress: Fans run louder than they used to, and for longer periods of time. In the worst case, they run at full speed almost all of the time, and then the unit either BSOD’s or spontaneously reboots. If a laptop, use canned air in short bursts only, to clear the vents of dust. If a desktop, open the case, take outdoors, and blow all dust out.
If the cpu paste has never been redone since new, now is the time to clean off all old, dried paste and apply fresh compound to the cpu and re-fasten the heat sink. If a 2008 unit, it’s been five years of use since this required three year maintenance has been done. Canned air should be used every six months or so. Proper maintenance will extend the life of a system by a factor of 1.5x or more.
BAD CAPS can be an issue in older machines. If you see any leaking, swollen tops, anything less than perfect and immaculate condition, you’ve got Bad Capacitors. The key here is that they must be in perfect condition.
Once you rule out a hardware overheat issue or BAD CAPS, then you can focus on either repairing your avast! installation or do a clean install. Not doing the above will mean that you can repair/clean install all you want, but a system will continue to have BSOD’s and spontaneously reboot until the overheat issue is fixed and addressed first. Avast! will never run as it should if this important maintenance work is not done.
In other words, all hardware must be in serviceable to excellent condition before one looks to software corruption as a possible issue.
For example, PSU’s have been known to fail gradually in continuous rated power output over time. In fact, it’s [a] normal occurrence and service techs make allowances for them to do so when specifying a replacement PSU.
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