Spontaneous Restarting

[Si]

I have just upgraded my OS from Win98 to XP Pro the other
day and I have found that my system randomly restarts
itself. I followed some MS advice and I turned off
the 'automatically restart' check box as one of the
settings. Then, the next time I got a stop command (it
would restart otherwise), it goes to the blue screen as
intended, with the error, PFN_LIST_CORRUPT.

Is there any way I can resume this? MS says to look
for 'bad' or 'incompatible' drivers, but how do I find
one driver that is bad out of so many? Does anyone know
what the problem may be or what system information you
may need to help? Thanks.

Si

 

[Guest]

By searching the forums, people have said that it may be
to do with the power supply. In the UK we have 240V to a
plug socket. I have two sockets in the wall. One of the
sockets is used by my lamp. The other has a 6-socket
expansion pack. In that expansion pack, I have my PC
power, monitor power, telephone, speaker system and desk
lamp plugged in. Could this be causing the problem? That
is doesn't have enough power? Although it used to never
restart randomly when I was on Windows 98. My OS is the
only thing that has changed. Help!

 

[Lem]

By searching the forums, people have said that it may be
to do with the power supply. In the UK we have 240V to a
plug socket. I have two sockets in the wall. One of the
sockets is used by my lamp. The other has a 6-socket
expansion pack. In that expansion pack, I have my PC
power, monitor power, telephone, speaker system and desk
lamp plugged in. Could this be causing the problem? That
is doesn't have enough power? Although it used to never
restart randomly when I was on Windows 98. My OS is the
only thing that has changed. Help!

Plugging too many things into a single outlet might cause a fuse to blow
(or a circuit breaker to open) or -- if you have been so foolish as to
increase the size of the fuse or breaker -- start a fire, but with the
kinds of devices you've listed, this won't cause your PC to misbehave.
The power problems you're referring to are caused by the inability of
the power supply device inside the PC box to provide enough power to all
of the PC's components.

To Si:

I found 3 MS KB articles by searching on PFN_LIST_CORRUPT.
Although all are directed to Win2K, they may apply as well to XP (I
don't know).

One of the articles (Q271955) suggests that bad RAM could be the
prblem. To check this, run memtest 86 from http://www.memtest86.com/
Run it over night unless it detects errors right away.

Another (Q285014) says that it happens if you have an ATI Radeon video
card and play one of a few MS games.

Finally, the last one (Q291806) suggests, as you said, a driver problem,
and advises:

To troubleshoot this behavior:
1. Run hardware diagnostic tools that are provided by your computer
manufacturer.
2. Disable all file system filter drivers, such as backup utilities,
virus scanners, or firewall software.
3. View the following Microsoft Web site to verify that the hardware
and the drivers for the hardware are compatible with Windows 2000:
http://www.microsoft.com/hcl/default.asp

For information about the hardware on your computer, contact the
manufacturer.
4. If you receive this error message randomly, or when you try to start
a program, remove extra memory or have the random access memory (RAM) in
your computer tested. This behavior may occur if you have bad RAM.

If I had to guess, I'd say you have some flaky RAM.

 

[Guest]

Firstly, thank you for your reply.

How does RAM become bad when it was fine before I
installed XP? I have 512MB DDR RAM if that matters. I
will look into it, but MS keeps saying it is because of a
bad device or driver. I did upgrade from Windows 98,
would it be better to do a clean format/install? *sigh*

Mind you, saying that, it hasn't restarted in about 5
hours now.

 

[Ken Blake]

In (e-mail address removed)

How does RAM become bad when it was fine before I
installed XP?

No it's not that it becomes bad. It's rather that XP stresses the
RAM more. The RAM might be marginal--good enough to work on
Windows 98, but not good enough for XP.

 

[Guest]

But I have 512 RAM? Is that not enough to run XP? I know
loads of people with much less RAm, and can run Xp fine
without it randomly restarting. Its double density too.
It usually does it on an action. For instance, it didn't
do it for 6 hours, and then when I clicked "shutdown" I
got ye olde blue screen o' death. Same error as before:
PFN_LIST_CORRUPT.

I really need this to be fixed - it's annoying when I'm
doing nothing important. But if I am, I'd lose work.

Anyone? Please?