Quirky Restart
 

Recently, my Windows XP machine has been restarting on me when I return from idle.

For instance, when I wake up in the morning, turn on my lcd monitor, then move the mouse to activate the OS, the screen shows up for a second, then goes blank and the "no signal" screen shows up on my LCD. It just sits there in limbo until I turn it off then turn it back on.

I cannot think of any reason for this, and it is obviously quite annoying.

Any thoughts?

What's the machine?

Did anything change about the time this started?

Does it do this if you force it into standby or only after the automatic delayed version?

Sounds a bit like you have something that isn't coming out of its power saving mode. It can be caused by an old/buggy BIOS, BIOS power settings, chipset, drivers, etc. Getting the whole thing to come back to life is a dance and any little subsystem that doesn't cooperate can tank the works. Check for updates and see what happens.

I don't use standby, so only the LCD monitor turns off and idle. I am beginning to think it might be a power supply thing. It's a home-made computer.

The latest failure came when I was playing music on iTunes, and the screen turned black (green light on LCD turned to the inactive orange). The music kept playing for like 15 seconds, then when I moved the mouse, it screeched and I had to restart it. During the restart process, it paused at the loadup screen (recognizing the internal parts) 3 times.

Is there a diagnostic program somewhere that can run tests on all hardware to determine the health of a piece. I have a hard drive monitoring program that provides detailed feedback but I was wondering if there was an all-purpose program that could let you know which pieces of hardware are nearing death.

Upon further review, I am nearly positive that my power supply is failing.

The whole issue I had/have with my keyboard turning off could be explained by this, the random restarts, freezing during restart, etc.
The hard drive, recently, has at times been spinning at normal times but is slower at times (audibly).
http://www.informit.com/articles/art...seqNum=12&rl=1
This site basically describes all of my problems except for the overheating. It also mentions static electricity disruptions and during the winter whenever I turned on my monitor and got shocked, the computer restarted.

This stinks.