Back in December last year, I was having a series of mysterious system shutdowns. Trolling around the newsgroups, I've discovered that the problem was probably due to bad capacitors on the motherboard.
I disassembled my PC, and discovered that some of the capacitors on the motherboard had already leaked. This was characterised by several observations. The top of the capacitors have a dome-shape, instead of flat appearance, and there were brown-coloured precipitation on top of it.
The reason for this went back to the last decade / century. A scientist had stolen the formula for capacitors from his company in Japan, and had sold it off to a few Taiwanese manufacturers. He had no qualms about it, despite not having the complete formula. The end result of this was that the capacitors failed in less than their expected lifetime.
To make a long story short, I replaced my motherboard and my problem was solved.
I just received a call from my brother, whose system was having several mysterious shutdowns. I told him my experience quite some time ago, and after having carried out an investigation recently, he discovered that the capacitors on the video card had leaked.