Random reboot of XP HOME SP3 Emachine

[Mark]

I have an Emachine T3104 (about 3 yr old). OS is Windows XP Home SP3
installed in May 08. RAM upgraded from 250MB to 500MB in June 08. Running
Norton antivirus thu Dec. and Spybot S&D. Computer was working fine until
Dec. 30 when it began rebooting randomly and frequently. I removed Norton
and installed Avira antivirus Jan. 01. Avira in safe mode says the computer
is clean. Norton found nothing prior to that. Safe mode w/networking has the
reboot problem. Motherboard looks fine (no visibly burned capacitors.
Turned off auto restart in XP. This revealed the error
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL STOP: 0x000000D1
(0x5B7734E4,0x00000002,0x00000000,0xF693FCD9). My search of this shows D1 to
be a memory error. I have swapped and then removed one RAM chip at a time
the problem still occurs. Downloaded MEMTEST86 but could not get XP to
recognize the boot CD(?) but I see the BIOS is set to boot CD first. Any
help on this
is appreciated. Does this sound like a virus or hardware problem?

 

[Malke]

I have an Emachine T3104 (about 3 yr old). OS is Windows XP Home SP3
installed in May 08. RAM upgraded from 250MB to 500MB in June 08. Running
Norton antivirus thu Dec. and Spybot S&D. Computer was working fine until
Dec. 30 when it began rebooting randomly and frequently. I removed Norton
and installed Avira antivirus Jan. 01. Avira in safe mode says the
computer
is clean. Norton found nothing prior to that. Safe mode w/networking has
the
reboot problem. Motherboard looks fine (no visibly burned capacitors.
Turned off auto restart in XP. This revealed the error
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL STOP: 0x000000D1
(0x5B7734E4,0x00000002,0x00000000,0xF693FCD9). My search of this shows D1
to
be a memory error. I have swapped and then removed one RAM chip at a time
the problem still occurs. Downloaded MEMTEST86 but could not get XP to
recognize the boot CD(?) but I see the BIOS is set to boot CD first. Any
help on this
is appreciated. Does this sound like a virus or hardware problem?

It sounds like bad hardware. Perhaps you didn't burn the Memtest86+ .iso as
an image? If you burned it as data, that would explain why the system won't
boot from it. Also, if you have two optical drives (and did burn the .iso
correctly), try putting the Memtest86+ disk in the other drive.

If you did burn the .iso correctly and if the advice about the drives is not
applicable, your motherboard may be bad. eMachines are notorious for having
hardware issues.

Malke

 

[Bill Yanaire]

Get rid of that EMachine. They are junk.