random restarts

[Guest]

three year old HP Win XP 128 ram amd randomly restarts with no warning or
message and reboots directly to the windows desktop, no safe mode, no scan
disk nothing. I have turned off automatic restart. This had no effect,
machine still restarted with no messages. Even Viewer shows same error over
and over coinciding with the times of the reboot. Error is as posted here
Information 3/29/2005 4:59:01 PM Service Control Manager None 7036 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 4:59:01 PM Service Control
Manager None 7035 SYSTEM EVELYN
Error 3/29/2005 4:56:58 PM acpi None 4 N/A EVELYN
Error 3/29/2005 4:56:58 PM acpi None 5 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 4:57:23 PM eventlog None 6005 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 4:57:23 PM eventlog None 6009 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 1:11:10 PM Service Control
Manager None 7035 SYSTEM EVELYN
Error 3/29/2005 1:09:27 PM acpi None 4 N/A EVELYN
Error 3/29/2005 1:09:27 PM acpi None 5 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 1:09:51 PM eventlog None 6005 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 1:09:51 PM eventlog None 6009 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 1:04:43 PM eventlog None 6006 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:56:50 PM Service Control Manager None 7036 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:56:42 PM Service Control
Manager None 7035 SYSTEM EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:56:42 PM Service Control
Manager None 7035 Owner EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:56:42 PM Service Control Manager None 7036 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:56:42 PM Service Control
Manager None 7035 SYSTEM EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:56:42 PM Service Control Manager None 7036 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:56:40 PM Service Control Manager None 7036 N/A EVELYN
Error 3/29/2005 12:54:56 PM acpi None 4 N/A EVELYN
Error 3/29/2005 12:54:56 PM acpi None 5 N/A EVELYN
Information 3/29/2005 12:55:20 PM eventlog None 6005 N/A EVELYN

I did find a reference to this problem and the bios for this PC. The fact
that the event viewer display an error referencing acpi lead me to believe I
might be on to something. I downloaded the newest bios and flashed the ROM. I
then went into the bios setup and turned off power saving. I also went into
control panel and disabled hibernation and set the PC to power profile of
always on. Restarted PC and it ran for sometime and then rebooted again.

One other thing, I did find a reference to a conflict between the bios
setting of Plug and Play enabled and Win xp, so I have disabled BIOS plug and
play. Currently waiting for the next reboot.

After this I have no mmore ideas. Suggestions?

 

[Michael T]

Three checks come to mind:

(1) Scan for viruses
(2) Go to Control Panel|SYSTEM|ADVANCED tab|START UP & RECOVERY and UNcheck
the
"automatically restart" box. Then you should see an error message instead
of a reboot.
(3) Check your drivers - e.g. with Device Manager. Sometimes a bad driver
can cause your symptoms. For example, you may want to see if any have
updates available.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your response. I neglected to post that I had gone to Control
Panel|SYSTEM|ADVANCED tab|START UP & RECOVERY and Unchecked the automatic
restart button. It still had no effect. I had run a full virus scan, spyware
scan and did a check with both hijackthis and a full scan with MS
antispyware. Machine was spotless. I also did a check for conflicts with
drivers however I did not reload all the drivers. There were no conflicts.
The strange part is that you would think that a sudden restart like this
would trigger a blue screen or an error message or even a scan disk. But it
boots directly to the desktop as though nothing had occured.

 

[Michael T]

If you turned off the auto-restart then the likelihood is that the machine
is rebooting at a lower level because of a hardware failure - maybe over
heating (check the CPU fan is running enthusiastically), maybe faulty RAM.

You could try running MEMTEST or one of the other memory test programs and
see if it reports any errors.
http://hcidesign.com/memtest/d­ownload.html