For the past week or so, my computer has been restarting itself at the most in-opportune moments....not that any moment is a good one when I didn't ask for the restart myself.

Sometimes it only gets as far as opening to my screensaver page. Sometimes I can be on a website for ages and all of a sudden the computer will shut down ... but automatically restart again.

Yesterday it was very difficult to restart, but eventually I got a screen up that said I had an error in the Directory file. It deleted files, then recovered orphan files. I have no idea what any of that means, I just know it sounds a bit sick.

I run IE and Firefox.

Does anyone know what might be the cause if it's something that's obvious to you, or does it sound terribly expensive? If it's the latter, then I guess my days on line are numbered!

Thank you in anticipation to anyone who might have an idea.