Spontaneous Shut-downs-Reboots

D

Dave Wilson

The problem as of mid_July:

For the last few days my WinXP Home computer has been shutting down or
restarting on its own , sometimes even when I'm away from the computer
and doing

nothing with it.
When it finishes booting I get a message that "Windows has recovered
from a serious error". When I allowed the automated reporting MS
suggested that this was

most likely caused by an Iomega program related to my Zip drive. I
downloaded a patch as per MS instructions, but this did not help. I
then uninstalled the

software ane removed the Zip drive, but the problem persisted. I then
used a drive image program to rewrite my C drive as it was at the end
of April, long

before I experienced the problem, but it is still restarting or
shutting down on its own. I have an external Maxtor one touch USB 2.0
drive and a Sony USB 2

..0 external DvD writer, but I have used both without a reboot
happening. On the other hand, I have noticed that the Maxtor drives
lights sometimes show

activity when I'm not using it , but not always.

A check of the Event Viewer shows the errors as system error category
(102) event 1003. There is a probably related event 1001 which says
"The computer has

rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x100000be (0xb92d55c4,
0x00e84162, 0xb95b74fc, 0x0000000f). A dump was saved in:
C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini

072404-04.dmp." This file contains no text and can't be deciphered,
at least by me.

I have run Norton A/V , Spybot Search & Destroy, and Ad-Aware with
negative results.

The problem now:
As mysteriously as the above occured out of the blue, it went away
for about 3 weeks and I had no trouble at all. Then this morning it
has re-appeared with

spontaneous shut-downs and reboots whether or not I'm using the
computer.

I am running a CPU temp monitor which shows 59-60 C which according
to AMD
is normal for my Athlon 2100 and is the temp that I've had right
along.( In the Bios the CPU temp shows as 54 C).Norton and Spybot
still find nothing.

I tried to do a memory test with Memtest on bootup from a floppy, but
another
problem is preventing it. I can start the test, but after a couple of
minutes,
the screen starts scrolling diagonally and becomes unreadable. This
always occurs
during a reboot until windows loads, but previously hadn't occured
following a cold
boot. Is there a program to test memory from within windows? Is there
a hard drive
utility that I can run from within windows?

What is causing these shut-downs? What should I do?
 

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