Mouseless said:
After starting XP, a mouse movement causes the computer to reboot. Very often
it's the very first touch to the mouse. Sometimes I have a couple of seconds
to do something. If I don't touch the mouse and use only keyboard,
everything's fine and the computer can be used for weeks without reboot. OR
sometimes mouse doesn't reboot and if it doesn't happen in one or two
minutes, then the computer can work OK for weeks. I can't find the conditions
when the mouse causes the reboot, and when it doesn't. Any optical mouse
behaves the same way - MS Intellimouse wireless, Acer wired, Verbatim
minimouse. They can be attached to USB or to PS2 (using an adapter).
Each reboot creates a minidump, if it can help.
Windows XP Pro SP2, Compaq Presario 5430US, Pentium-4 1.8GHz 1GB
On an older machine, it could be related to power. Or it could be
related to software/drivers.
To test the power theory, you can try a program that loads the CPU
to 100% loading. I use Prime95 for that. You can download the latest
beta version, which supports single or multi-core processors. You unzip
the program and execute the .EXE file by double clicking on it. The .EXE
is about 4MB or so when unzipped. The program will prompt you to "Join GIMPS?",
just say No. You are going to "Stress Test". A custom dialog will come up.
It will specify an amount of memory to use for testing. On my 1GB machine,
one box in the custom dialog offers to test 767MB of it (the amount of
free memory I have). I set it to a lesser number, like 100MB. Then, when
you're finished with that dialog, the program will start. It also has
menu options to "Stop" and "Exit" when you are done. (The program
runs from the folder you unzip it into, and doesn't install like
a normal program.)
http://www.mersenne.org/gimps/p95v255a.zip
http://www.mersenne.org/ (explains what the program is really for...)
Prime95 will run continuously for hours. On a properly working computer,
it should not encounter any errors. It does a mathematical calculation
with a known answer. They check the results, and that is how they can
tell if the computer is healthy.
Since you are doing a "load test" here, you can stop and exit the program
after 5 or 10 minutes. You should know by then, if the computer reboots
when the program starts testing, whether the problem is power related.
(On a computer with a bad power supply, the computer may reboot seconds
after you start the test.)
For the second thing, software/drivers, I boot a Knoppix (knopper.net)
or a Ubuntu (ubuntu.com) Linux CD. Those are examples of operating systems
that don't need to be installed on the hard drive. They can work from the
CD. If you can move and use the mouse, while one of those OSes is booted,
then you know the problem is a Windows software issue of some sort.
Both of those OSes are a 700MB download, in the form of an ISO file. It
is too big for download via a dialup connection, and would take forever
if you tried it. You take the ISO file, into a program like Nero,
and burn the image to a CD. (ISO stands for ISO9660, a format of information
suitable for bootable CDs. The file must be read by a burner program and
transferred - you don't just copy the file onto the CD to make it work.)
With the Ubuntu version, once the CD is burned, you can restart the computer,
and boot the computer from the new CD. If you can move the mouse around
in there, then there must be something up with your Windows software.
There is probably some useful info in the minidump, but I don't know if
I can help with that. I did download a package from Microsoft, which is
used by software developers, and I think I got a dump analyzed, but
the software was a bit too intrusive (always running on every reboot)
so I had to uninstall it. It used a client/server architecture, so it had
to go. It could have been this one.
"Debug Diagnostic Tool v1.1"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...41-C458-46F1-B24D-F60151D875A3&displaylang=en
Paul
