Son had fun with magnets

[padan]

I have a problem with one of my computers that I'm not sure how to fix. My son stuck a magnets on the side of the computer. its 4 month old gateway that i baught from best buy. its running win xp sp2. After the magnets were placed on the tower the computer has had a weard problem. It appears to run fine on start up but it will sudenly act like it lost power and then restart(no error messags). this hapens randomly. it will sometimes do this at start up or after a few minets of running it will crash. i have done a reformat. after a reformat this problem doesent happen for a day or 2. But it always starts to act strange after not much time. I have done a disk scan to check if something was wrong with the hard drive but it doesent come up with any errors. Since it runs fine most of the time i was hopeing that one of the hardwhare pieces has just suffered minor damige and could be a simple replacment. i have no idea though how to go about finding witch piece is damiged though. Or it could be something compleatly different. I still have a lot of things to learn when it come to computers =)

thanks for the help
-padan

[Fed]

I don't think the magnets are to blame.
Turn off Aotomatic Reboot on System Failure.
That way you will get an error screen instead of a reboot which tells you nothing.
Check your Event Viewer for error warnings.
What realtime protection are you using, Firewall, Antivirus, Anti Spyware/Malware?
Are you confident of your electricity supply?
Save yourself getting hit with a lot of questions...
Download, unzip, install and run Everest Home Edition
http://www.comcen.com.au/~fed/everest.zip

Select Computer>Summary from the left hand screen.
Right click in the right hand screen & select Copy All
Paste the details in here.

[highlight]Edit:[/highlight] You could also download a program to test your HDD, if it is a magnetic problem then your HDD is the thing that would be effected.