Random reboots
 

Athlon 1.0 Ghz
384 mb pc 133 SDRAM
Western Digital 40 gb hard drive
Liteon 16x DVD
CyberDrive 36/12/48x CD-RW
Antec 350w SmartPower power supply (new)
Azza mainboard (Via kt133A chipset according to the documentation which is halfway in Chinese)

The problem I'm having is periodically the computer will just reboot. I will hear the harddrive cycle and the computer just reboots in the middle of what I'm doing. There isn't any app in particular that sets it off, I'll be word processing or web browsing or going through my porn collection when this happens. I thought it was the cheap generic power supply I had, but I just replaced it with a new Antec supply and that didn't fix it.

Try turning off reboot if critical error accurs in controlpanel>system>advanced (Winxp). Maybe you have heat censors auto reboot you because temp goes up too high? Bad overclocking? Test your memmory with memtest

Sorry to sound ignorant here, but what is memtest? That sounds like a fairly likely candidate. Oh, I forgot to mention, I am running XP Home, and Redhat 8.0. I haven't noticed if the problem has happened under Redhat at all. The CPU temps is ok, I have a hefty heatsink fed air by a 80mm case fan, the airflow in the case is good. I have not overclocked this processor at all. According to VIA hm my CPU temp is generally around 93 degrees F during normal use, and peaking at 98 degrees during DVD playback

something might be wrong w/ the power supply.

check the volt's and make sure that it's cool.

Start with the easy things first



Go to MS and run ALL critical updates (IE - tools - Windows Update)
Install all driver updates from MS
Clean out your temp and temporary Internet folders
Run Scandisk
Run Defrag

If it still reboots randomly

Get latest drivers for Video card, Sound Card, Modem, etc.
Flash your bios
Update the chipset



BTW - What typ of PC is it?

Just noticed you have a VIA chipset....got to the VIA website and download the latest 4 in 1 drivers for your board....I'd do that first.

Peace - Rich

Here is the VIA website...they make it easy like Nvidia with their prepackaged stuff.

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2

Er..maybe its overheating.

XP has some bugs in it relates to hardware. Random reboots are symptom of that. Like ccvirginia said, via drivers are a good start, after that try other hardware drivers from the manufactures website. This was a problem I had with older Dell PC's at work.

My friends did this, we unseated his processor and realized it wasnt even touching the ghetto grease that comes on the processor fans, so we took it off (nail polish) put on the good stuff, seated it properly, and now his comp owns mine ;(

Random reboots ive experience in the past are all thanks to the memory. Maybe you have one chip running at pc133 that is only pc100? or maybe the memory just conflicts with each other... I had a similar problem when running 768mb of ram in my computer. But as soon as I removed the 256chip everything went back to normal.

Hope this helps!

When's the last time you defragged?

ccvirginia thanks for the link to the VIA drivers. I installed them, time will tell if that fixes it. If not, (it does it anywhere from a couple of times a day to once every couple of days) then it is probably the cheap generic memory I have in there, in which case I'll just wait til I can afford a good new DDR mainboard and quality memory.

Yes, please get back on that. I have a friend that is having similar problems with a MSI MB(I think they use VIA?) but it might be related to his PS too.

Bill, have you turned off the "reboot on critical errror" setting listed above?

If so , it should be giving you a BSOD (blue screen of death:p) instead of rebooting, what kind of error are you getting, what does it say?

Or is it still just randomly rebooting even after that setting is off. This will help narrow down the problem a bit

It hasn't happened for me since I installed the updated drivers yesterday. I did turn off the reboot on critical error setting and no BSOD yet. The thing about this problem is it is very random, sometimes it will go a day or two without doing it and then return, so I'll have to assume if it goes a week without doing it then it's probably fixed (I usually leave it on 24/7) I usually defrag with Norton Speed Disk once a week and there is about 15 gigs of content on a 40 gig drive.

Well keep us updated, its a good possiblity it coulda been a driver issue