Computer reboots

[Chandy]

A friend of mine has a problem with her computer rebooting. She uses the computer for various things (not flight simming) including for TV viewing.

* The machine will reboot every hour on the hour (latest was for a week), and/or

* Reboots itself at random times

There is no blue screen of death, just an auto-shut-down and re-boot. It doesn't matter whether the computer is in TV Mode or not. The local dealer and his product supplier are stumped and have not been able to fix the problem so she is desparate and I'm feeling guilty for getting her to buy the machine there.

Can anyone come up with what may be causing this problem?

Regards,

John G

[}SkOrPn--7]

Just a thought go to Start\Control Panel and if it's not all ready done on the top left click "Switch to Classic View". In the list scroll down until you see "Power Options" and double click the icon then make sure in the "Power Schemes section in the drop down arrow select "Always on"

In the section "settings for always on power scheme" make the top window that says "Turn of monitor" show "always on". In the "Turn off Hard Drives" make sure it says "Never" along with "Standby mode" to say "Never"

Click on the "advance tab and ensure in the power button section the first window says "Shut down" and the second says "Standby". On the hibernate tab take the tick out of "Enable hibernation"

Give that a try

Have you installed any software lately that maybe causing this?

Try a system restore back before this started happening also check that the cables connecting to your hard drive and MOBO are housed right.

Also while your in the control panel click Administrative tools then services then scroll down the list and see what the "Uninterruptible Power Supply" is set too. Just right click it and if you don't have such a device select in the drop down window "disable"

[Matthew Webb]

So frustrating!!!

I had a similar problem.. Ended up being faulty memory (even though the computer shop sent the memory back to me with "tested fine".  I eventually sent it back to them )

[Tweaker]

Random reboots are mostly memory related and only rarely will you get a blue screen.  Sometimes you will get a "rebooting form serious error" message when it restarts.  Also, as it is forcing a reset, you wont get any minidumps to check.

The regular rebooting sounds like there is a program that is either causing a shutdown and restart as described above, or it is accessing the areas of RAM that is causing the issue.  Unfortunately it could be anything from the time server to your anitivirus updating.  Quite difficult to figure out.  I lean to hardware issues though.

There is a free program called MemTest that you can download, burn to CD, and boot from.  This allows you to run a torture test on your system memory and see if there are errors being produced.  It is what the techs use to diagnose memory errors.  If you run Vista, there is also a mem test built in.  From memory (I don't run Vista at the moment) it is a boot option so you may have to hit F8 during the boot sequence (just as it goes from the hardware display to the loading windows bit) to get access to that.  I don't know how good that is but I believe it should be enough to help nail the RAM issue down.

Other options are dodgy hard drive, or worse, dodgy south bridge on the motherboard. Then of course, there is power.  If you can try to isolate the PC onto a circuit that doesn't have much else running on it.  Fridges can draw a lot of power suddenly and cause the power supply to reset/cycle, which will force a reboot.  So if there is anything that regularly draws power to start/stop then that could also be causing an issue.

There is another program that I used to use a lot to help diagnose issues, but I can't remember the name of it.  It is payware but has a trial period which only limits a couple of things.  Ok just found it   Try Passmarks BurnInTest.

Hope that gives you somewhere to start.