Hi Folks.

I am/was in the middle of rendering a large 3-4GB file in AVI format to MPEG2. It was meant to take 4 hours and all was going fine for the first 2 hours. Then out of the blue. my machine just shut off.
My computer is about 2 weeks old and is the following set up :

Dual Core 2.6GHZ Processor
Nvidia Geforce 8500GT Video Card
3 Gigs of Ram
3GB/Sec SATA Hard drive
Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bit

I built this computer myself so I included an Artic Cooling system for the CPU and my case has several case fans, so it stays pretty cool in their.
I have never ever had vegas crash like this. Is it possible that vegas got over worked?.
My computer is not showing any signs of over heating at all.

I have it also set to not shut of the Hard drive or go into sleep mode while rendering.
Pretty strange issue.

Hard to say without more information. What happened when it crashed? I've known computers to get weird errors and re-boot/shut off when the CPU or memory overheated. Is this computer in an air-conditioned room? Check the BIOS to see if there's some sort of power saving mode that's switched on. Double-check the system/hardware/hard drive settings, make sure they are set to "ALWAYS ON" or something like that.

sounds like a bad power supply, or an underrated one

has nothing to do with vegas

HD is set to run at all times. My computer is in an Air Conditioned room that is around 70 degrees most times. Gets up to about 75 in the evening.

I dont know if it over heated or not, It showed no signs and If it is what happened, then i am highly annoyed with the artic cooling system I have.

My power suplly is a 480W power supply and was recommended as a solid product. It runs fine and is used everyday for maybe 8-9 hours.

But yeah, it just turned off half way during render.

Check the windows log books, they should give you an indication what happened during the auto shutdown.

Could be you need a bigger power supply, it has happend to me. Get a 6oow and that should fix it. With drives spinning and proccesing /rendering going on, the poor old power supply takes a hit.
I could be wrong but that's what i would try.

Another thought. Is the Windows or any other auto update turned on? Vista for example can do it's thing then shutdown automatically. I got a fairly major auto-update a few days ago and I caught it before it did that. Anyway another thing to check. Also Adobe Reader, iTunes, Quicktime etc.

Another thought. Is the Windows or any other auto update turned on? Vista for example can do it's thing then shutdown automatically. I got a fairly major auto-update a few days ago and I caught it before it did that. Anyway another thing to check. Also Adobe Reader, iTunes, Quicktime etc.

Yeah, I've been caught out by that. Very annoying! I was actually very surprised when I discovered it had automatically rebooted the pc.

Maybe it was updates, I have most programs on Manual for updates, but yes a few do update on auto mode. Thanks for all the great replies.

I will check out my logs and see what they say.