4X4BOB

My daughters PC has developed a problem which causes it to reboot.
After a short time, anything from 2 to 15 mins after turning on, it shuts down and reboots. It appears to be random as the timing of it varies. Sometimes when rebooting it freezes and wont boot up so it has to be powered off to restart it again.

I cant find any viruses on the machine so any ideas?

Its an old PIII 500mhz 256Mb running XP home edition.

Bob

lightning101

Is the processor fan still spinning at full speed ?

Id it spinning at all ?


If it is try reseating the RAM chips.


Then re-fit processor fan.

dba

I would check out viruses before any hardware stuff

try the free mcafee download at

[url]http://uk.mcafee.com/root/mfs/default.asp?cid=9578[/ur]

also,try their free Stinger at

http://uk.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=stinger

also,do you have running processes that look suspect,such as mslaugh?

I am not a techy dude,but i have just had the same problem as you,becuase i went ontot the internet to download a firewall and got 3 viruses immediately,one of which rebooted like yours

dba

and this

http://uk.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=stinger

BedHog

Could be heat related, check the cpu fan is working ok - it probably wouldn't be monitored on a system that old and fans do fail. I had the same problem on a system I built for a friend and the cpu fan wasn't seated correctly.

*Edit - if it fails on reboot then it's unlikely to be a virus

4X4BOB

Thanks for the relies so far . . .

Have already checked temps and fan speed and could not find any suspect progs/tasks running.

Will try the McAfee download tomorrow (daughter lives with ex-wife!)

Bob

Fig

Sounds similar to problems I had on my sons PC recently.

Bit drastic, but I resorted to backing up user data to a spare drive, then reformatting and reinstalling XP which has sorted it out. Common suspect is video card drivers, but could be any driver misbehaving and attempting to access a protected area of memory. Someone (SidHead I think) also suggested it could have been ASPI drivers (for CD Writer etc.)

You can change the way XP handles these errors to prevent it automatically restarting (can't remember exactly how, and am on Linux box at present so cannot check for you, but sure someone else will put you right) - instead you'll get a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) which may or may not give clues to the cause.

Good luck

4X4BOB

Cheers Fig
I had to re install XP about a month ago to clear a problem ( cant remember what it was for now tho')

If all else fails I try another XP install !

Bob

dba

Fig

I was getting driver blue screen of death,and the error message said it was driver related,(i transmitted the errors to MS and got the driver error message back)but it turned out it was a virus,

becuase the virus brought XP down mid task XP thought the driver was to blame.i spent ages updating drivers after a full install,but becuase i still went online unprotected i was zapped again,doh!

GC8

XP is usually configured to restart after a software error, which alone may not have caused Windows explorer to fall over. To correct this go to: Start > Control Panel > (show all view or somesuch) System > Advanced tab > Startup & Recovery settings button > Sytem Failure and remove the tick from Automatically restart. Thats from memory as I dont do this anymore.... Apply and restart. If an up to date virus scan does not find anything this may allow you to investigate further. If this doesnt work Id suggest backing up any data; removing all peripherals from the system unit and remastering / formating and re-installing Windows.

Simon

Iain Young

I had the same problem in one of mhy old pcs. Turned out to be because a dodgy memory chip / slot. This can also happen if one of the memeory chips (or pc cards) is not quite seated correctly in its slot.

If you have no joy looking from the software side, it may be worth opening up the pc and checking everything is inserted correctly (may be worth taking each card out and putting it back again to make sure).

cong

by the way xp wasnt designed to run on such slow of processor if your playing game or doing too much intensive running of programs the computer will most probably crash due to the fact it will run out of system resources

Iain Young

Until recently, I've been doing Visual Studio .net and Java developement on a PIII laptop with 256Mb ram running xp home and have had no problems with crashing, (although it was a bit slow). I suspect system resources is unlikely to be the problem here but as you say, it is a possibility....

dba

lol,so basically it could be anything,just have a guess