PC starts up fine but every time I shut down or restart I get one long beep before it does. PC likes to restart on its own a lot and I have to gigs of ram and put fresh heat absorbent stuff between the processor and the heat sink so it cant be over heating. Any suggestions?

"PC likes to restart on its own a lot" This is more of a problem, I'd work on it first. The beep may be power supply, would be my guess. Try a known good one. Might be that the computer is actually sending a fault but kind of hard to tell, I doubt the event view would show an issue. Might look at it. Might look at dump logs too. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

"and put fresh heat absorbent stuff between the processor and the heat sink so it cant be over heating" It can still be overheating if you applied it improperly or installed the heatsink backwards. For the "heat absorbent stuff", you only need a tiny dab about the size of a grain of rice. And because of the way socket A heatsinks are made, they can only be installed one way...get it backwards & the heatsink won't make proper contact with the CPU core. Did you check the temp readings in the BIOS? http://www.targetpcinc.com/dhtml/im...