For some time i have been experiencing problems with my computer. when I have been running high spec games the computer would turn off. the screen would go black and i would have to wait for 20-30 minuets before I could use the computer again.

The problems steadily got worse until i was having problems running lower performance games, and even Firefox for a long period of time (6+ hours)

Because of this i decided to re-format the computer, and hopefully erase any problems, faulty drivers etc. I managed to uninstall and rewrite the hard disk without any problems. However the computer would shut down after 3-4 minutes of installing windows.

I had assumed that this was an overheating problem somewhere, and therefore i took off the side of my computer to see if any of the components were particularly hot. The Graphics card was the hottest of all of the components and therefore I thought would be the one most likely to be a problem.

To further investigate this i tried another graphics card in the computer, however, for some reason the card did not work properly. So i tried my graphics card in another computer, this then worked well, and i was able to run a high performance game for over an hour before i stopped to try again.

I then installed Ubuntu on the computer which was able to be installed without any problems. This was the first time i had used Linux on a computer, and though i intend to switch over to it a some point I was not able to have all of the facilities that i needed (mainly a wireless internet connection) working. and therefore i abandoned having Ubuntu installed onto the computer and have tried to install windows again, and I am experiencing the same problem.

I did some research into the problem and discovered someone with a similar (but not exactly the same) problem, which was resolved by getting a new and better PSU, however I wanted to get some advice before buying a new PSU, and having it not work.

Thanks for reading and for any help.