Machines rebooted themselves last night?

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Guest

Sometime in the last 8 hours my XP Pro machine and Vista Business machine
restarted themselves.

They are both laptops, and both have fully charged batteries this morning
(and both are set to hibernate if the battery drops to 5%).

I have Windows Updates set to notify me for installation on both machines.
But even if they did install the updates themselves, they wouldn't restart
without asking me first...I hope.

The other weird thing is that all of my preferences have been reset in
Photoshop, which was open when I decided to get some sleep last night.
(Unfortunately, I was in the middle of working on a project when I decided to
get some sleep. Of course I hadn't saved my progress in some time.)

Yesterday I connected both the Vista and XP machines to my Mac's external
HD. I mapped network drives on both machines to this resource. That's the
only thing I can think of that's changed on both machines. But the Mac didn't
reboot last night, and I can't understand why that should have anything thing
to do with this issue. Particularly, why all of my Photoshop prefs would be
reset.

Did anyone else experience something like this?
 
Many times during power outages or surges. If you get a power outage for 2 seconds or more it will cause your computer to reboot\start again. And always SAVE your work. Mine is set to do this every 5 minutes .
 
Peter, as I mentioned...Both machines are laptops. Neither would shut down in
a power outage. The Vista machine has dual batteries, with about 6 hours of
power. So even if the power had gone out right after I'd fallen asleep and
stayed off long enough to deplete the batteries, I would at least see the
them recharging when I woke up.

Also, as mentioned, the Mac (which is not a laptop) had not rebooted, so the
power-outage theory isn't working.

And yes, normally I save my work constantly, but it was late and I was
falling asleep at the keyboard, so I forgot to save before falling out of my
chair and onto my bed.

What's bothering me here is that both of my Windows machines restarted
themselves last night, but my Mac didn't. This makes me think that some
Microsoft-specific thing happened.

Microsoft updates sometimes require a restart, but I have both machines set
to notify me before installing updates.

So the question remains...why did my machines restart last night? Did anyone
else experience anything like this?
 
Search for files or folders created or modified after you fell asleep.
It might give some clues. What about Scheduled Tasks? Monthly or
weekly tasks? AV auto updates?

John
 
IWantXPBack said:
Peter, as I mentioned...Both machines are laptops. Neither would shut down in
a power outage. The Vista machine has dual batteries, with about 6 hours of
power. So even if the power had gone out right after I'd fallen asleep and
stayed off long enough to deplete the batteries, I would at least see the
them recharging when I woke up.

Also, as mentioned, the Mac (which is not a laptop) had not rebooted, so the
power-outage theory isn't working.

And yes, normally I save my work constantly, but it was late and I was
falling asleep at the keyboard, so I forgot to save before falling out of my
chair and onto my bed.

What's bothering me here is that both of my Windows machines restarted
themselves last night, but my Mac didn't. This makes me think that some
Microsoft-specific thing happened.

Microsoft updates sometimes require a restart, but I have both machines set
to notify me before installing updates.

So the question remains...why did my machines restart last night? Did anyone
else experience anything like this?
Click to expand...

It shouldn't have been Windows Update, but if you're curious, manually
go to http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/ and check your
Update History. That will show what and when updates were installed.

You might also check Event Viewer
(Start | Run | Type: eventvwr | Click OK)
and see if anything is recorded just before the restart
 
IWantXPBack said:
The other weird thing is that all of my preferences have been reset in
Photoshop, which was open when I decided to get some sleep last night.
(Unfortunately, I was in the middle of working on a project when I
decided to get some sleep. Of course I hadn't saved my progress in
some time.)

Did anyone else experience something like this?
Click to expand...

Similar. Last week I went to sleep. While I was asleep, someone came in and
took all my stuff.

The odd thing is, they replaced my stuff with other stuff that in all ways
is identical with the stuff they took!

It's taken until now to sort this all out.
 
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