PC reboots after 20+ minutes recording in stereo

[lynhood]

XP, Audacity 1.3.12, 44,100,Stereo, recording from vinyl record. PC totally reboots after 20 minutes of recording. Can't recover lost files. Help, please.

[steve]

How many hard disks/partitions on your computer, and how much free space is there on each?

[lynhood]

75 gig h/dr..63 g/b free. (no partitions)AMD Sempron Processor 3100+, 1.81 GHZ, 960 mb of ram. (I've already told you more than I know) on..XP HOme Edition, Vers. 2002, Serv. pack 3.

[steve]

75 gig h/dr..63 g/b free.

Is that 63 gigabyte free space,or 0.63 gigabyte?

[lynhood]

63 g/b free , not .63 (sorry)

[kozikowski]

Your machine appears to be profoundly unstable. Audacity is the coal mine canary. If your machine isn't perfectly stable, you may have problems, but rarely does it cause restarts. That's pretty serious.

Have you ever done an error check or defragmentation on your hard drive?

Start > My Computer > Right Click C: > Properties > Tools > Error Check. If that passes OK, then Defragment.

Koz

[lynhood]

Yes, last night. I did both. HD error check found no errors..and I defragged. It was a strange looking defrag b4 and after. It had 3 columns widely separated..but it went thru the entire defrag. We also have avg antivirus & screen saver disabled. It just rebooted, for 3rd time today. This time, (thankfully) it let us restore our project. Normally we've been getting error message (when trying to recover ) was something about line 432.