Reboots by itself

[dcgoff]

My son’s computer will randomly shuts itself down and restart on it’s on and I have no idea why! He had been having some problems (he thinks he had a virus) and the system keep loosing the CMOS info. So I replaced the CMOS battery, formatted his hard drive and then reinstalled Win XP home edition. He loaded his video and sound drivers and a couple of games. You can be on the internet or playing a game and the system will just shut down and restart on its own and with no warning. He now tells me that this is one of the problems that he had been having before. Any ideas would be most helpful.

 

[RichPLS]

Could be overheating, that would cause that. Is the CPU fan spinning?

<pre><font color=red>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[dcgoff]

I thought about that but all three fans are running: case, cpu and power supply.

 

[RichPLS]

Then it could be a bad stick of ram, download <A HREF="http://memtest86.com/" target="_new"> MemTest86 </A> and test it.
If you have some additional ram, you can swap it for a test and see if problem goes away too.

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And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[peartree]

And it could be a bad power supply, as well as a number of other things. Not that rich's answer is wrong. Memory is just one of the things you'll need to check. Since it's happening before AND after a reformat and reinstall of Windows, I think we can rule out it being a virus or other software problem.

Your move with the CMOS battery was a good one, but you've got more work to do.

<font color=green>****</font color=green> Never Assume <font color=red>ANYTHING</font color=red> <font color=green>****</font color=green>

 

[scoots987]

I have in past have found that a power supply can be very tempermental. Everything appears to be working properly but the computer still behaves incorrectly. Try replacing the power supply.

 

[Zippper]

Random rebooting is first and foremost usually a heat issue either the CPU is heating up too much or Power Supply packing it in.

Another issue is that within windows, there is a section by right clicking on my computer, selecting properties, go to the Advanced Tab, and select Startup and Recovery. Uncheck the "Automatically Reboot" and then wait for it to give you the blue screen error codes to find out what is wrong. IRQ conflicts will do this a TON and/or Driver issues hence IRQ conflicting. A lot of Soundblaster Live! cards did this on systems that had quite a few peripherals installed. Bad Ram is a posibility although bad ram on a OS install usually makes your install corrupt being that windows XP does a bit count and will error out on copying files or checking system configuration.

Hope that helps you

 

[Lonewolf19]

May sound stupid but stupid is as stupid does. Have you made sure your windows power management settings are not set to reboot after certain elapse time? Also, check your system BIOS and make sure your motherboard doesn't have build in power managment options that may have been set to reboot after certain idle time.

 

[Sentenza]

I had the same thing... my comp just rebooted every five minutes.

I replaced my power supply, and all is fine.

Just try using one from a different computer, thats what I did, and then I bought an Enermax 480W