Computer shuts down

anything in event viewer? make log of time of day/circumstances and track the reboots. use performance monitor to see if system resources dwindle just before reboot? maybe an incompatible driver or software utility is 'leaking'...or else it's hardware
either heat or a failing power supply...
check all the fans on the powersupply, processors and ram (if any)...
swap in another power supply...

Check in the Control Panel under the system applet the advanced tab. You will see Start up and Recovery. In the middle of the screen there is a check box for automatically reboot. Uncheck that. This may give you more of an idea of what is happening when the PC suddenly restarts.

Only voltage or heat could create such a violent reboot. Windows should at the very most do a bluescreen of death but this is still very unlikely with XP. I would definately not let this process continue for too much longer, or the motherboard or CPU will probably not last much longer. The easiest way to accomplish this is to make sure all the fans are working (the power supply fan and the CPU fan) and if no cigar, swap the power supply for another one. If these simple fixes don't work, trydisconnecting all cards, non boot-drives, and only leave one stick of ram installed. If the problem still occurs, try re-applying the service pack just in case some freaky system file got overwritten (not likely).
If none of this stuff works, it unfortunately looks like a bad CPU, Motherboard, Video Card, or RAM. If you have spare parts from similar systems, swap these out individually until the system works normally. If you have access to a diagnostic utility this would be a FIRST step, and would do a lot of this work for you.
Good luck.

Craig Jackson
craig@jacksoncomputing.us

First up, right click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Advanced tab and select Startup and Recovery.

Uncheck the Automatically Reboot option. This will then give you the dreaded Blue Screen of Death when the next error occurs, butat least it will tell you what the error is, and then you can use the MS Knowledge Base, or indeed this forum, to troubleshoot it further.

Until you disable the Automatic reboot, you really don't know what is causing the problem.

Get hold of the error number and description and go from there. This is not a solution, unfortunately, just a start.

Cheers

Alan

It happened to me before when i was working Office XP on WinXP. Tried doing all windows updates also does not help.

In the end, i reinstall my systems from scratch, step by step, starting from the standard ones like Office XP on the 1st day. As iadd on, i document all softwares i install.

This works so far. I am into 1 month after using doing this.

I was just having the same problem with my system, what I found to work after a little while of troubleshooting, was that my IDE cable was loosely connected to my harddrive. Over the years, it must of vibrated to that point. Let me know when you have your problem solved.

This question was auto-closed because it is 90 days old

This question was auto-closed because it is 90 days old