Sudden reboot

Hi,

Reboot may be caused by several reasons, here is a little help for you:

1. If you consider heat is the reason, try downloading a temperature optimizer, you should check www.cpuidle.de
2. Check the CPU fan is installed correctly some times people switch sides.
3. Disable the automatic reboot option of Windows XP (Properties of the PC, then Advanced, then Startup and Recovery, then unflag Automatically Restart), you might have a blue screen with out knowing.
4. Check the Event Viewer (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools) for blue screen errors.
5. Some times old drivers of the video card can give you reboots, check drivers and proper installation of the card.

I'm sure you will find a great hint on the Event Viewer history :).

Hope this help,

Regards,

Jorge Avila

What is your OS? Check for Spywares (Cockroach), and nalyze when exactly it goes out, while Using some specific program??

Besides the other Great Suggestions you can try some stress testing by downloading The Ultimate Boot Cd from

http://tinyurl.com/3jnpy

And booting off this CD and run the M'Board & Cpu tests both of these are open ended and will go for as long as you want or until the unit falls over. If you are running the CPU test when the unit fails it's a good chance that the CPU is bad and if the M'Board test produces the same result I would be looking at the M'Board.

As no one else has nemtioned this if you have more than 1 stick of RAM remove them and check that they are actually the same specs as this could be causing your problem as well. If they aren't I would just try running with 1 srick of the fastest Ram that you had installed and see what if anything happens.

If it works perfectly I would then replace both with the same Brand Spec RAM. Or as many as you had but you'll need to look at your M'Board manual as there will be an upper limit that each RAM Slot can support and if you have a Pentium 4 you should have 2 identical sticks installed or you'll be running slow.

Col

Had two E-machines cross my workbench in as many months. One with an Intel MB, the other AMD. Both fairly new, and nice little towers. Both had bad power supplies, that smoked the Motherboards. Replaced both power supplies (parts I had), purchased 2 new MB's for about 100 bucks with shipping, and passed on 2 nice little systems, with DVD and CDwriters, audio, USB and Firewire ports up front that are working great. I'd say in your case, if the Speedfan helped some, chances are a bad processor, that's overheating. Is it possibly overclocked?

well i'd update the bios to the latest greatest just to make sure that wasn't a factor and turn power saving stuff. do you get complaint that pc was shut down improperly? anything in the event logs (probably not). what peripherals are plugged in. does it do it when booted to your os install cd? can you tried to force the failure by deliberately overheating, like blankets on it?
a more useful thing to know that 'since i bought it' is how long exactly has this been going on? and can you pin it to anything, like virusscans or defragging

The pc seems to be working fine. I am puzzled as to why. I removed a memory stick I added when I bought the unit. Could that cause it to suddenly reboot? It came with 2 sticks of 256 mb. I purchased a stick of 512 mb and installed it. Can this cause such a strange problem? If so how would that cause a reboot? Then the question is how do I resolve the issue?
Thank you