Random Restarts

[Mr Pig]

Hi,

I recently purchased an AMD Athlon 1800+ XP second hand.
It came with Win Me. - Everything worked fine in ME so I
upgraded to XP. Now in XP occasionally my system randomly
restarts for no apparent reason. I uninstalled XP and the
restarts are no longer a problem...I really want to use
XP so I'd love it if you could help.

Any Ideas?

Thanks

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

After installing, disable the autorestart on failure default and see if it
produces a stop error. To disable it, check the control
panel/system/advanced/startup and recovery settings. The stop error will
provide clues to the problem.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Windows
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone

 

[Mr. Pig]

I did as you suggested, but the error message was
something weird like 0x0231312 etc...

I checked the dmp file with notepad but i can't make it
out....it's in gibberish lol.

Any more advice?

Is there any software i can use to diagnose these kind of
problems? I thought it may be the Power Supply Unit but
it works fine in ME....

thanks

 

[Mr. Pig]

It happened again:

This time I noticed:

Page_Fault_in_Nonpaged_area

any ideas what that means? lol

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Is that all there was? No verbiage? When did it happen? Have you checked
that all hardware and software is xp-compatible?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Windows
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone

 

[Guest]

I uninstalled my nvidia geforce4mx440 drivers and
reinstalled the old ones. (on the cd) the error hasn't
appeared yet. usually i run passmark and the 3d tests
cause the pc to give this error. now passmark is going
fine...fingers crossed eh?

thx for the help

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Yes, it's due to incompatible software or driver. Frequently this is from
Easy CD Creator 5.0, but that is not the only cause (a lexar USB driver is
another cause). If you have the space and capacity, you might try a clean
install to another drive or partition to see if it's a driver issue or a
software issue. I would recheck all installed software, even if you haven't
tried running it since the upgrade.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Windows
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone

 

[Alex Nichol]

It happened again:

This time I noticed:

Page_Fault_in_Nonpaged_area

any ideas what that means? lol

That is an area of RAM used for system components that are so critical
that they may never be 'paged out'. These are very unlikely to have
bugs that cause the system to think they *have* been paged out, and this
usually indicates a fault in RAM. XP is touchy about RAM, and
especially if there are more than one module, I would check that they
are in fact identical.

It is possible though that some third party module has got in that area
- Norton products sometimes do, and if you have one of them I would
leave it out in the first instance anyway. The other ones I would check
on are video drivers and any special drivers made by the board maker
(quite likely VIA 4 in 1 ones with an Athlon, where VIA chipsets seem
popular). Make sure you get the latest versions from the relevant maker
(not Windows Update) after installing the system initially.

And BTW make sure you get the patches against the BLAST and Sasser worms
downloaded and put on a CD before starting, and run them before you
connect to the Internet for even a minute