Oreally said:
Using XP2 updated.......The computer will reboot itself once or twice a
week.
Help?
Marc
That could mean, the computer has "blue screened", and you have
selected automatic reboot as a reaction to that.
The first step would be, to go to the System control panel,
Advanced, Startup and Recovery, Settings, and untick the
box next to "Automatically restart". That will keep the
blue screen error message on the screen, until you can
copy it down. Then you can manually complete the reboot
and continue on.
Copy down the numbers, and particularly, the name of the
driver or code file that is crashing. You may see a trend,
such as the same driver file each time. It may imply a
hardware problem with that particular device. (Like, a
video card driver could be crashing, as a result of
the video card overheating, because the fan on it is
stuck and no longer turns to cool the card.)
Record as many of the crashes as you can, and post a summary
of them here, if you need more hints.
If the crash messages are relatively random, affecting entirely
unrelated pieces of code on the computer, then the computer could
be telling you that some RAM is failing. You can do a basic
RAM test, with a tool from this page. Scroll half way down,
to the download section.
http://www.memtest.org
Even if this turns out to not be a memory problem, it's still
good to have a copy of that software handy. I've had three lots of
RAM go bad, a couple after 1.5 years, the latest after 2 years
of usage. And even if memtest passed last week, it could be
failing this week. So having at least one copy sitting around,
is a good idea.
Other reasons for a computer to crash are:
1) Power supply is getting weak. My first power supply became weak,
and even today, it still runs and didn't blow up. But the 12V rail
is so weak now, it can't even run a single cooling fan any more
(100ma fan). So supplies don't always disappear in a cloud of smoke.
They can also bow out gracefully. And system crashes might be the
first sign. One of my more modern systems, started crashing, because
the power supply had some leaking capacitors inside it, on the
secondary side.
2) You can also have leaking capacitors on the motherboard. Some Dell
models were particularly hard hit. So hard hit in fact, that when
you see those models for sale on the web, stay away. You couldn't
even safely order a replacement motherboard for a machine like that,
because the replacement could have bad capacitors, just like the
original one.
http://www.badcaps.net/images/caps/kt7/kt3.html
Systems can also crash, because of malware. The existence of malware
multiplies the number of symptoms computers can produce, by a large
amount. So that is another potential cause, and much hardware to
pin down.
Paul