Random computer restarts

[MattJWilliams]

We suffered a power cut last night and since then the computer has
consistently restarted itself at random moments. I was wondering if anyone
can help me please?

 

[M.I.5¾]

We suffered a power cut last night and since then the computer has
consistently restarted itself at random moments. I was wondering if anyone
can help me please?

The chances are that something was sitting in your hard drives's cache
waiting to be written back, and of course it wasn't because of the power
cut.

The obvious thing to do is to restore the last backup you made of your
system before disaster struck. You haven't got a backup? I can't
overemphasis the value of a proper backup - as this demonstrates.

Oh well, the first thing to try might be to do a system restore to the last
restore point before the power cut. If you are very lucky, it might just
have copied the damaged file. Otherwise a repair install of Windows should
fix the problem. And if that doesn't work (unlikely in my view), then a
complete rebuild, but do make a backup first so that at least you can
recover your data files.

If you regularly suffer power cuts, it may be worth your while looking for a
UPS to run your PC from so that at least you can shut it down properly.
Someone here just bought a 500VA unit from e-buyer for just £14.99
(including USB connectivity so that it will auto trigger a shutdown when a
power cut occurs.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

We suffered a power cut last night and since then the computer has
consistently restarted itself at random moments. I was wondering if anyone
can help me please?

If your computer is restarting spontaneously, you are presumably
blue-screening, and you are set to the default of rebooting whenever
that happens. It's a poor default setting and you should change it.
Right-click My Computer, and choose Properties. On the Advanced tab,
click Settings under Startup and Recovery. Under System failure,
uncheck the box "Automatically restart.

Now when the problem occurs again, instead of restarting, you will get
the blue screen with diagnostic information. Post back with those
details for more help.