I built a new comp using a p4 2.4c. Whenever I tell it to restart, it just shuts down instead. Also, often times when I press the power button, roughly half the time it will fail to post and power off. I have an abit IS7-e motherboard. I overclocked it to 3 Ghz no problem, although I didn't have time to stability test. Thought the OC'ed setting might be the problem, so I changed it back and when I booted the hard drive had a corrupted boot file, which is weird, since I locked the bus at 66/33 agp/pci. Why is it doing stuff like this? How do I fix it?

Sounds like instability, did it just shut down like that before you oc'ed it? What brand & speed of ram do you have? Try clearing the cmos by taking the battery out from the m/b and the atx power for 30secs.. replace and then re format and reinstall windows.

My ram is geil value ddr400 memory, it's fully capable of doing ddr 400 at 2.5-3-3-6, so I know it's not my problem. I reinstalled windows, and I'm going to do more testing now, I'll post when I get results.

Kev, followed your idea as to it being instability and gave it a voltage bump. It's working perfectly happy now. However all my onboard usb ports seem to have died. I worked around it by using a pci usb card I had lying around and a ps2-usb adapter on my mouse. However I would still like to get my usb to work. It flashes like it's fine on bootup but dies out as soon as windows starts loading. Any ideas or suggestions on that? Also, it doesn't matter if I'm at the normal or the overclocked settings, it's dead either way.

That's weird...if you have an optical mouse try taking it out and puting it back in the usb to see if windows will install it. if nothing happens i can't think of anything...except for that maybe when you oc'ed it something happened to it?? or maybe the usb is turned off in the bios from getting cleared. or maybe the usb 2.0 driver isn't inatalled into windows, usally you have to install it when you get your board.if that isn't the case you can always try to clear cmos again and then see what happens if still nothing i would reformat again.

Yeah i'm almost sure that it's the usb driver if you didn't install it, you need to to reinstall all the chipset drivers and stuff from the cd the comes with you m/b.

Yeah, prolly should have thought about that. I just realized I'm getting over 70°C when running at 3Ghz and 1.575v. At 2.4Ghz and 1.525 I still get over 67°C. This is using the stock heatsink from the box, an aluminum block (no copper at all) with a fan on it. I used my own thermal paste. In fact, I mounted a 92mm fan over the heatsink and it's fan to create a double fan effect, which increases airflow, and it still gets that high (it was even higher before I did this). I know it isn't case airflow problem, as I was getting ~45°C on a palimino at 1.6 ghz and 1.85vcore using only a volcano6 cu. Do I need to upgrade my cpu heatsink or something, this seems barely adequate.

I keep hearing the same thing from a lot of people, it could be the hsf but i think maybe it's that some cpu's just run hotter than others..also i don't know if it's me but i noticed after i oc a cpu it always seem to run hotter after when i turn it back down to stock for even a week with the same ambient temps, like my cpu i have now 3.06ghz was at 37c around then i oc'ed it and now it never gets lower than 39 at the same ambient temps, when not oc'ed...also when i have it at full load it also gets higher like 47c before it was like 43c. anyone else notice this?

You can try another hsf it will probably get your temps lower.also aluminum cases will work better for cooling.

I have aluminum case. I'm going to make a new thread later as this one is getting pretty far down the list.