by DThor » Sun Sep 02, 2012 4:03 pm
I'm sure everyone has their theories out on the intarwebz, but when I start to get really nasty stuff like that happening, it seems that statistically, for systems that ran just fine for years, I found it was the power supply was the weak link in the chain out of mboards, memory, etc. Absolutely, the quality of power supply can affect this, but most people outside of real power users tend to use rather generic power supplies, and once your power starts to get unstable, you get things like this.
Of course it could be the mboard, but if you're at the point where you are thinking about replacing parts of the computer, and not just buying a new one, I've found it's not that hard to find an old power supply from an older computer you can swap out - it's excellent for tracking down the cause.
DT