This is more of an answer to a few problems I had. I think it may fix a lot of the problems of randomly rebooting machines which reboot with no error message that have good video card/drivers and have normal tempatures.
My machine would randomly reboot with no error messages. well it finally really irritated me, so I went off in search of the answer and found a series of bugs.
When you install DirectX from the Windows Update page, although it says it was installed successfully, it really wasn’t. Everything will work fine except that 3D hardware acceleration is toasted. You have to download DirectX to your local machine and install it from there to correct the problem. On to the next bug.
I run 1.4 Ghz AMD Athlon. The board is a shuttle AK31V20 (AK31 Version 2.0) with all 4 dimm slots filled with 256meg SDRAM DDR. The AK31 Version 2.x boards have a bug in the BIOS. The current BIOS version is AK31S20F, prior versions are AK31S203, AK31S207 (the version I had), AK31S20D, and AK31S20E. The bug in the BIOS is only activated if all 4 dimm slots are filled with exactly identitical memory. The bug causes random rebooting of the machine, it appears to happen when the amount of RAM required exceeds the capacity of the first ram chip. Updating the BIOS to AK31S20F will fix the problems and make the machine run faster, you could also update to AK31S20E which is reported to fix the problem, but doesn’t support AthlonXP, only AK31S20F supports AthlonXP.
BIOS History
http://www.spacewalker.com/english/readmeak31v2x.htm
download the new BIOS
http://www.spacewalker.com/english/note1.asp?product=AK31 (V2.x)
Instructions for installing BIOS updates
http://www.spacewalker.com/english/download.htm
FYI, the AK31 boards are widely known for their economy and stability when the BIOS is fully updated, so it is a superb board, just don’t let an old BIOS stay on it. 🙂
