Topic awaiting preservation: Computer keeps rebotting

My brother's computer started rebooting itself with no warning the other week. I had a look at it and although he reckoned it was only happening when he surfed the Internet it crashed on me when I opened my profile before I could do anything. I installed FF as it seemed like IE could be the problem but he reckons its still going on (even though it seemed to start acting fine when I was there). I ran the virus cecker, looked for spyware and checked the firewall and it is all running fine (as far as I can tell anyway).

The problem is that it could be anything - I'm half tempted to get him to throw it over to the ISP to troubleshoot (even though it might not have anything to do with them which could leave us at square one again) but I thought I'd throw this open for suggestions.

I had a look around and things to look include:

1. Power supply -the old one died last year and he does have a new one but is it powerful enough?

2. Has anything new been installed? Not that I'm aware of but:

3. Its possible they upgraded to SP2 as I have it set on automatic updates so I need to check that.

4. Overheating?

5. Hard disc trouble?

6. Corrupt drivers?


http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic19085.html

http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread.php?t=1484

http://www.actuary.ca/actuarial_discussion_forum/showthread.php?t=46491

I see viol ran into a few problems with SP2:

http://www.ozoneasylum.com/23077

One piece of advice I found:
http://www.ironworksforum.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=31;t=020461;p=

suggested unchecking the "Automatically Restart" so that I wil get to see the error message which seems like a good idea too.

Sooooooooooooo long story short is there anything I can do to narrow this down? Is there anything else it is likely to be?

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

Definitely check the error if you can that will narrow it down, also i suggest starting it up on safe mode and see if you can make it reboot., that would narrow it down to a software issue if it does.

Im currently having a similar issue with my XP box at home. Ive found that the rebooting problem is ussually hardware related, as in my case i believe its my vid card overheating.

One thing youve not mentioned that it could be is a bad stick of RAM



(Edited by EzRa-D on 02-22-2005 17:54)

OK I killed the automatic restart and it produced BSoD with a "PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA" and 0X00000050 error.

I looked in the system log and there were a lot of 7023 errors ("The Application Management Service terminated") from 4 or 5 days ago which is when the problem arose and around the time my brother uninstalled MS Messenger (which might suggest some kind of registry issue).

It was started in Safe Mode and was fine for ages so I went over and restarted it and it was fine for the couple of hours I was there. The above errror messages suggested it might be a problem with RAM memory allocation so following advice here:

www.techangel.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=502

I set the page file to zero rebooted and set it back again and didn't run into any problems and things seemed to be working OK.

I'm unsure if it has fixed itself, I have fixed it or the problem reoccurs when I walk out of the door (I do have a tendency to intimidate machines into working ) but thats the progress report (mainly from memory but I think I got most of the info in).

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

There is some info on the microsoft webpages about a problem with windows terminal server, though you have to ask the support staff to send you the fix for the problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;833154

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