sixate

Once last week mt PC rebooted, I wasn't home. Then, while I was sleeping this morning it rebooted again. I have no clue what's causing it. I just built my PC a little over 2 months ago, and it runs perfectly, even when gaming, and it's never crashed on me while using it.

Now, my question is how can I figure out what's causing this? There's no Windows has just recovered from a major problem error or whatever it says, so I have no clue what the deal is.

specs:
XP SP1
AMD 3200+
Gigabyte GA7N400 PRO2
4 Western Digital 80GB SE's
9800 PRO
Kingston HyperX PC3200(2x512)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
CDR & DVD
Vantec 470 watt PSU

VF19

Im thinking power outages?

sixate

Nope, I haven't lost power in a loooong time.

Scorpion23

I would definitely check to make sure it isn't a windows problem first. If you can, get a knoppix cd and boot from it. Then run some sort of program in the background that uses a constant cpu load. If it stays on for a day or more it's probably windows.

If it goes off though you have a bigger problem (hardware related). This happened to an old computer of mine. It would restart randomly every two days or so. After awhile it got more frequent; once per day, 3x per day, and eventually to the point of every 30 seconds. Turned out to be a bad voltage regulator on the motherboard.

If you can, setup hardware monitoring software to record your voltages at about 1-2 second intervals. After a restart look at the last few readings for abnormal voltage levels.

Otherwise try taking out hardware and see if it still does it.

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God of Thunder

Random reboots, if they are not software are generally a heat problem. Make sure all fans are operating and that the pc has plenty of breathing room.

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Fallon

there is a way to get a full core dump. I randomly had my computer reboot whenever i'd get online, and i ended up doing that, getting the full dump and finding what crashed it. It's in control panel->system->advanced->settings and set the core dump to whatever, I did a full dump and got it.
My problem was with an HP comp and a faulty driver so I doubt our problems are the same, sorry
hopefully it helps though.

Kllr Wolf

If you are using Windows XP it has an option that is selected to reboot computer on windows error. Most of the time when it does this it will not inform you of an error unless it was something major or the problem still exist. I am not sure where it is to deselect and I am not on an XP machine at this time. I always disable it so i can see all errors instead of it rebooting to correct it.

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MahlerIsGod

Here is something to consider: My jackass of a roommate installed a Netbus type of program on my computer and he randomly restarted (amongst other things) my computer. Is that a possibility?

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Holo

dumb question: do you have the RPC patches installed? You may have just been lucky and gotten two reboots.

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Scorpion23

Kllr Wolf: forgot all about that :-/

I don't know where it is but the XP Antispy program can disable it.

__________________
"Empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality" - Edward Tufte

Fenton-J-Cool

Hooold the phone folks. We are jumping to some drastic conclusions here, and the answer is simple.

Ever notice how you don't get blue screens of death with Windows XP? Microsoft changed things around so that in situations when you would normally get a BSOD (like a hardware conflict or file allocation table failure), your computer just restarts without another word.

If you want it so XP actually gives you a blue screen, and tells you the memory address where things went wrong (then you can get help using the message here)

1. Right click on the My Computer icon and choose Properties.
2. When you see the System Properties, click on "Advanced" tab"
3. In the Startup and Recovery portion, click on Settings.
4. By default, "Automatically Restart" is enabled. Uncheck it.

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wra

sixate

No heat problems at all.

No.

Nope.

I'll try that and see what I come up with.

Thanks everyone.

jay-g

I was thinking the blue screen too. They just told me to up the memory. And i havent had troubles since.

cheese

Another thing may be power dips. not an outage but just enough to make you puter reboot. use to happen all the time when i lived at home sence i moved out never once.

saltfish

I had this very same problem, Sixate.

I thought it was my Windows install, no.
I thought it was my power supply, no.
I thought it was a bad surge protector, no.
Bad ram, no.

Turned out that it was the voltage regulation on my motherboard. Luckily the board at the time had a removable/replacable VRM.

-SF

Toecutter

I dealt with a situation like this at work. The state has Dell Optiplex GX 150 in their arsenal, with Win2k Pro as the OS. These machines would randomly reboot. At first, we thought it was spyware or a shockwave issue, but upon further investigation, we disabled the video card in the BIOS, and attached the monitor to the integrated video adapter; this has stopped the random reboots on all of these machines. If you have an integrated video adapter, give it a shot, if ya dont have one, well, um, just ignore this rant! LOL Good luck.

Dragonlich

We had a client with a similar problem: spontaneous reboots every once in a while. We test the computer, and it runs fine for hours on end. We only had one problem: 3D Mark would crash during the CPU tests.

We ended up swapping her Asus P4R800 (ati chipset) for an Asus P4P800 (Intel 865 chipset), which solved the problem. I dunno if it was the videocard or the chipset itself, but the combo was the problem. Hell, we had installed that (new) P4R800 in her system a week before, to replace a "defective" one.

The weird part is that we sold dozens of those systems in that period, and hadn't had a complaint from any of the other people. Not *one*.

sixate

First, thanks for all the replies. I've tried taking out hardware and shit like that and nothing seems to make a difference in how this bitch runs.
OK, so all I've been able to come up with is one little thing. Both times this thing randomly rebooted I got this error in the Event Viewer in Administrative Tools:



I've Googled around to see what I can come up with, but I have no clue what the deal is. Does anyone have an idea?

Fenton-J-Cool

That seems to be the BSOD issue rearing its ugly head. Did you try the above steps?+

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wra

SiN

I googled/searched ms a bit using "event ID" 2019...
kind of vague, but a couple possible leads?

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;822219
(the best link i found including 'xp' in search)

http://search.microsoft.com/search/r...ent+ID%22+2019
(most of these don't refer to xp)

http://www.chicagotech.net/wineventid.htm

Also have a look into identifying the memory leak - there's a util called performance monitor:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...d_perfmon.mspx

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=130926

you also can analyse your minidump file it may hold some clues, I had to do similar a couple years ago...

check these 2 links for more on that:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;315271
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;315263

I hope this is somehow helpful I kno how much of a pain in the ass such things can be...

Also maybe search google groups for some more info? I had a brief look, could be promising?

good luck.

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