Computer "restarts" itself, thought to be hardware

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musicman2059

I'm completely stumped on this issue. An employee in my office
started complaining that his computer was restarting on him, as if
someone had quickly turned it off and back on again. (As in the
system doesn't properly shut down, it just goes out altogether). We
already tried replacing his power supply (which was 15 watts less
powerful, however) but it only seemed to make the situation worse.

Now I'm sitting here with his computer, which does this at completely
random times. (It hasn't done it to me yet, but I can tell by his
event logs that it's been doing this, and I can tell that every time
it was an improper shutdown.) There are no PCI cards installed to the
system board, (everything is onboard) all its RAM sticks are the same
type, and the only storage drives/devices attached are a hard disk,
CD-ROM, and floppy drive. The fan and CPU (a P4) seem to be working
properly and at a normal temperature, according to the comp's BIOS.

Any help on this will be appreciated.
 
musicman2059 said:
I'm completely stumped on this issue. An employee in my office
started complaining that his computer was restarting on him, as if
someone had quickly turned it off and back on again. (As in the
system doesn't properly shut down, it just goes out altogether). We
already tried replacing his power supply (which was 15 watts less
powerful, however) but it only seemed to make the situation worse.

Now I'm sitting here with his computer, which does this at completely
random times. (It hasn't done it to me yet, but I can tell by his
event logs that it's been doing this, and I can tell that every time
it was an improper shutdown.) There are no PCI cards installed to the
system board, (everything is onboard) all its RAM sticks are the same
type, and the only storage drives/devices attached are a hard disk,
CD-ROM, and floppy drive. The fan and CPU (a P4) seem to be working
properly and at a normal temperature, according to the comp's BIOS.

Any help on this will be appreciated.
Click to expand...

First step is to check system options on the machine (Control
Panel/System/Advanced/Startup and Recovery), and make sure
it's NOT set to automatically reboot on a System Failure (blue
screen) error.
 
One hopes the blue screen, when you've changed that setting, will give
useful info about the failure.

Here are some other possible causes, by no means an exhaustive list.
PCs do vibrate ever so slightly, and intermittents are a pain to
isolate.

I'd run a disk diagnostic; a bad bit in an executable, however it got
there, can account for your problem.

So can an occasional extremely brief power transient, such as might be
caused by another device on the same house circuit, or a UPS with hiccups.

You might also try a known-good PC in the same place, if you can, or
move the subject PC to a known-good place:

- external power source flaky (check wall cabling, circuit stability, etc)
- bad bit in file - hard drive surface problem possible
- intermittent in-case shorts/improper grounding (mainboard touching
case, bad wire in some power or control cable, etc)
 
Apart from CPU over-heating being the most common reason, I have seen this
issue once on a Win98 system. After hours of troubleshooting, the issue was
resolved by reinstalling the "ACPI/APM" device under System Devices in
Device Manager. What foxes me is that the system was rebooting automatically
even before Windows was booting and so we thought this to be a hardware
issue, which turned out to be a power management issue.

Go to Device Manager and just uninstall and reinstall all ACPI/APM related
devices under "System Devices" and let me know if this helps. You can also
try fiddling with power management settings in the system BIOS.

Abhilash Tibrewal
 
Dan said:
One hopes the blue screen, when you've changed that setting, will give
useful info about the failure.

Here are some other possible causes, by no means an exhaustive list.
PCs do vibrate ever so slightly, and intermittents are a pain to
isolate.

I'd run a disk diagnostic; a bad bit in an executable, however it got
Click to expand...
 
Well, ever since the computer was moved into my office it hasn't caused
any problems, and the computer that's in his office now isn't having
any problems related to it. I tried running a quick disk diagnostic on
it and the HD checked out fine there.

The computer wasn't connected to a UPS or any other power-supply-like
device in his office, and I'm sure other computers on the same circuit
would be having the same problem if it was being caused by another
device on it.

I might take a quick look at the system board to make sure it's
properly in, to see if it's grounded properly.
 
I have had this happen and it was faulty ram. I just wished that I
had bought Kingston memory as it has a lifetime memory.
JIM McCARDLE (e-mail address removed)
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