Blahdy Reboot! I NEED help on this!

helloooo to anyone who possibly remembers me. i got a job and left this site for about 4 months so i've not been around for time. glad to see some quality changes have been made, namely journals for free, so i can cancel my membership to suicidegirls.com! wait, maybe not...hehe

anyway, i have a minor issue with my sexy new PC which is that it keeps randomly rebooting. i bet it will now while i'm typing. but all that is on it is P4 2.4GHz/120GB/256 DDR/ABIT SA7/Radeon 8500 LE/16x DVD-ROM/XP Pro. I know XP *can* be buggy but i swear, on my other system i never had a single crash. there is no software installed because i'm not into risking loads of data before i can save prior to periodic reboots. it's often enough to be annoying but not often enough that i can remotely predict it or stop using my beloved puker. but do any of you know of any inherent faults in any of the components listed, and if so how to possibly rectify them? have any of you encountered this before? i'm still a bit **** at a lot of this, i built it only to ruin it :bawling:

thanks for checking this, and thanks for any advice anyone can offer :>

xxx

well considering the higher end hardware you have in this system, I would be guessing heat as a first thing, you could try running it with the case removed to allow more airflow and see if that solves the problem, if it does you may have to invest in some more cooling such as fans, bigger heatsinks etc.

Have you got it next to any heat sources that the fan/heatsink might not be able to cool down well enough. Though as Mr Leachy said you may need bigger heatsinks/fans.

Check out crazypc.com for different cooling parts (Including a water cooling system).

Oh ok, no i ruled that out, for one thing i have a great fan anyway, and my case never gets near overheating. and i have tried with the case removed to be doubly sure. grr! but i appreciate the response :D

lovely though it would be there's no way i could afford liquid cooling right now even if that were the problem! *sigh*

Did you do some overclocking? Cause the Abit SA7 is well suited to overclock

Quote:

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ABIT SoftMenu™
The overclocking function includes CPU frequency, Vcore, multiplier, chipset & DDR voltage and AGP VDDQ voltage adjustment available to maximize your system performance.

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If you didn't oc then you don't need liquid cooling, good heatsinks and fans will do the job. go for PAPST fans.
You are sure your RAM is working properly?

I have seen this happen only once before where it wasnt a heating problem and it was actually something about a screw in the wrong place on the motherboard, I would just double check to make sure its not screwed into the wrong place somewhere or not enough screws. Also I recommend you look at the event logs to see if its telling you the error, perhaps something wierd with the ram? you can do this by Right clicking my computer going to manage then under system tools expand event viewer and double click System.

good point from spyrus, check the RAM out and if possible try it with another stick of the same stuff to see if you have a dodgy RAM stick, could be a loose connector on something or maybe a bad connection but i think i can safely asume that you have checked that out

it could also be a faulty board or IRQ on the very off chance, but thats about al i can think of for this particular prob, can anyone else out there enlighten us?

a computer randomly rebooting could be from a lot of things. a lot of times, it is the RAM, as was earlier mentioned by Spyrus and mrleachy. remove, replace it, test the system. if it stops rebooting, stop looking for errors. you might think about looking for some contact cleaner, too.

check for any loose connections, and that everything is plugged in snugly. if something like your video card slides out while the computer's turned on, it shuts down.

also, check your power supply. make sure all the cables are plugged in tight on the inside and outside of the computer. if everything's tight and dandy there, try swapping with a known functional power supply.

other than that, it might be some software problem. i don't know of many that would cause a computer to reboot, but i'm sure there are at least a few (ie. mentioned above)

iv heard that XP will do that if you run into an error it just reboots, there was a post around here somewhere about it im just not sure where, but thats really odd.

I found this article. It has an advice section further down the page that describes how to shut off the automatic-reboot function.

Hope this is of some help. :)

Whenever XP runs into a fatal error, it reboots instead of showing you a BSOD. So try turning it off and you'll see what the error is. Right clock on My Computer, and select Properties. Click the Advanced tab. Click the Settings button under Startup and Recovery and uncheck the Automatic Restart box. That should do it.
Cheers,
cgkanchi

Hi Lady,

definietly do as Zaggy and cgkanchi have indicated and turn off the auto reboot ... the BSOD should give you some info as to the likely cause of the problem - should at least widen the options as to the cause of the problem. Also you have some power hungry components - how much power are you supplying them with.... I suspect less than a 350-400W supply might give you problems. Failing that it might also be worth checking the AGP aperture size on the BIOS... default is 64MB but it may be worth cranking it up to 128 (possibly even 256 but I doubt you'd need to go this high as you only have 256 DDR RAM) .... I had a problem similar to yours i.e. constant rebooting for no obvious reason, a month or two ago.... I thought the RAM was knackered but it turned out that the AGP aperture.

hope this helps.

let us know how you get on

Z

Haha I've turned off the auto reboot and since doing so i haven't had the problem! typical, i'll never know now! but thanks for the amazingly insightful hints and tips guys, that has all been registered and absorbed for future reference. lets hope it does the trick! muchas gracias

xxx

i have had that same problem i am running a amd 1700 with 200/512pc2100ddr/ g4 video/xp pro. one thing to do isbump up your ram and give your self a large swapfile mine is set at 3gigs on a separate hdd.
mine was doing that before like if i ran media player with ie then shut either one down i would reboot or if i tried to do something else i would reboot. all i can tell u is crank up the ram and give yourself a fat swapfile. i still have to tweak it once in a while but i have'nt had any reboots in a while.
also if u want to see why it is resarting then right click my computer then select properies then go to enviroment and go to restart and uncheck the box that says reboot on errors. i may not have the exact direction but it will be in there.
good luck

Yes,like zaggy said..,windows xp auto reboots by default when it comes across a fault/conflict.This happened to me,but my problem was that i was running 6 software firewalls and 2 virus scanners at the time,lol.Anyway just to add to there comments there is also another way of turning off auto reboot by editing the registery.Go to: Start,Run,Regedit and navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl.
In the right pane choose AutoReboot,Right Click,Modify.Change value to 0 to disable and 1 to enable Auto reboot.Glad you got if fixed,and dont install too many virus scanners/firewalls ;)