winXP spontaniously reboots - why?
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my home machine (winXP pro SP2, AMD 3gig, 1gig ram, ATI Radion 9200 video card, purchased as a Compat Presario S5500UK, had a few minor upgrades since then) has recently (last couple of months) developed the nasty habit of spontaniously rebooting at random. so far i can find no patern to this. on one occasion i was editing a txt file in notepad, about 2 other programs open, and it happened, which seems to rule out system load. in fact system load (i use VMWare a lot) has nothing to do with this, as far as i can tell. one week ago i reformatted C: (deleted and recreated the partition) to see if this would help. i did that Saturday evening. Sunday i reinstalled various core programs i need, but only a bare minimum. the only hardware drivers i installed came from windows update - under the vague hope this would mean they were safe. on Monday i got my next spontanious reboot. i had installed VMWare 5.5.1, which installs drivers. that was the only candidate i could tie to the approximate time this started happening so i uninstalled 5.5.1, rebooted and installed VMWare 5.0 everything was fine, until today, when i got another spontanious reboot (Saturday), so just under a week between them, which is about average. after the reboot windows reports the error about 95% of the time. when it does this the error report is: Error type : Windows stop error (A message appears on a blue screen with error code information) Solution available? : No (see Next steps) What does this error mean? : Windows has encountered an error from which it cannot recover and needs to restart Cause : Unknown device driver Computer symptoms : A message appears on a blue screen with error code information (for example: e.g. 0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) i have just turned off automatic reboot to see if i really get a blue screen, and to see if it gives me any clues. windows is not giving me anything to go on here at all. how much faith should i put in this error description? is it likely to be software or hardware? last time one of my computers got this problem it spent 9 months bouncing back and forward between various people, never being fixed, before i finally gave in and purchased a whole new box, this one :mad: zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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my home machine (winXP pro SP2, AMD 3gig, 1gig ram, ATI Radion 9200 video card, purchased as a Compat Presario S5500UK, had a few minor upgrades since then) has recently (last couple of months) developed the nasty habit of spontaniously rebooting at random. so far i can find no patern to this. on one occasion i was editing a txt file in notepad, about 2 other programs open, and it happened, which seems to rule out system load. in fact system load (i use VMWare a lot) has nothing to do with this, as far as i can tell. one week ago i reformatted C: (deleted and recreated the partition) to see if this would help. i did that Saturday evening. Sunday i reinstalled various core programs i need, but only a bare minimum. the only hardware drivers i installed came from windows update - under the vague hope this would mean they were safe. on Monday i got my next spontanious reboot. i had installed VMWare 5.5.1, which installs drivers. that was the only candidate i could tie to the approximate time this started happening so i uninstalled 5.5.1, rebooted and installed VMWare 5.0 everything was fine, until today, when i got another spontanious reboot (Saturday), so just under a week between them, which is about average. after the reboot windows reports the error about 95% of the time. when it does this the error report is: Error type : Windows stop error (A message appears on a blue screen with error code information) Solution available? : No (see Next steps) What does this error mean? : Windows has encountered an error from which it cannot recover and needs to restart Cause : Unknown device driver Computer symptoms : A message appears on a blue screen with error code information (for example: e.g. 0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) i have just turned off automatic reboot to see if i really get a blue screen, and to see if it gives me any clues. windows is not giving me anything to go on here at all. how much faith should i put in this error description? is it likely to be software or hardware? last time one of my computers got this problem it spent 9 months bouncing back and forward between various people, never being fixed, before i finally gave in and purchased a whole new box, this one :mad: zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
i think ou need to check web site of corresponding products... www.directory-links.com
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my home machine (winXP pro SP2, AMD 3gig, 1gig ram, ATI Radion 9200 video card, purchased as a Compat Presario S5500UK, had a few minor upgrades since then) has recently (last couple of months) developed the nasty habit of spontaniously rebooting at random. so far i can find no patern to this. on one occasion i was editing a txt file in notepad, about 2 other programs open, and it happened, which seems to rule out system load. in fact system load (i use VMWare a lot) has nothing to do with this, as far as i can tell. one week ago i reformatted C: (deleted and recreated the partition) to see if this would help. i did that Saturday evening. Sunday i reinstalled various core programs i need, but only a bare minimum. the only hardware drivers i installed came from windows update - under the vague hope this would mean they were safe. on Monday i got my next spontanious reboot. i had installed VMWare 5.5.1, which installs drivers. that was the only candidate i could tie to the approximate time this started happening so i uninstalled 5.5.1, rebooted and installed VMWare 5.0 everything was fine, until today, when i got another spontanious reboot (Saturday), so just under a week between them, which is about average. after the reboot windows reports the error about 95% of the time. when it does this the error report is: Error type : Windows stop error (A message appears on a blue screen with error code information) Solution available? : No (see Next steps) What does this error mean? : Windows has encountered an error from which it cannot recover and needs to restart Cause : Unknown device driver Computer symptoms : A message appears on a blue screen with error code information (for example: e.g. 0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) i have just turned off automatic reboot to see if i really get a blue screen, and to see if it gives me any clues. windows is not giving me anything to go on here at all. how much faith should i put in this error description? is it likely to be software or hardware? last time one of my computers got this problem it spent 9 months bouncing back and forward between various people, never being fixed, before i finally gave in and purchased a whole new box, this one :mad: zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
The first two suspects are usually heat and bad RAM, although if it only happens once a week, I think that would rule out hardware since bad hardware doesn't take that long to cause problems. :(
--Mike-- Visual C++ MVP :cool: LINKS~! Ericahist | NEW!! PimpFish | CP SearchBar v3.0 | C++ Forum FAQ
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The first two suspects are usually heat and bad RAM, although if it only happens once a week, I think that would rule out hardware since bad hardware doesn't take that long to cause problems. :(
--Mike-- Visual C++ MVP :cool: LINKS~! Ericahist | NEW!! PimpFish | CP SearchBar v3.0 | C++ Forum FAQ
i did think about ram myself, but i am making the (wild?) assumption that running 3 VMWare machines simultaniously, with VS2003 or VS2005 active in two of them would stress test my system ram. after all, i only have 1 gig of system ram. heat, i had not really considered that. the machine has a large fan which only kicks in when the machine is running "hot", and that is normally silent when there is a problem. assuming this fan is working correctly (certainly it does run) then this would suggest not heat, at least to me. zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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my home machine (winXP pro SP2, AMD 3gig, 1gig ram, ATI Radion 9200 video card, purchased as a Compat Presario S5500UK, had a few minor upgrades since then) has recently (last couple of months) developed the nasty habit of spontaniously rebooting at random. so far i can find no patern to this. on one occasion i was editing a txt file in notepad, about 2 other programs open, and it happened, which seems to rule out system load. in fact system load (i use VMWare a lot) has nothing to do with this, as far as i can tell. one week ago i reformatted C: (deleted and recreated the partition) to see if this would help. i did that Saturday evening. Sunday i reinstalled various core programs i need, but only a bare minimum. the only hardware drivers i installed came from windows update - under the vague hope this would mean they were safe. on Monday i got my next spontanious reboot. i had installed VMWare 5.5.1, which installs drivers. that was the only candidate i could tie to the approximate time this started happening so i uninstalled 5.5.1, rebooted and installed VMWare 5.0 everything was fine, until today, when i got another spontanious reboot (Saturday), so just under a week between them, which is about average. after the reboot windows reports the error about 95% of the time. when it does this the error report is: Error type : Windows stop error (A message appears on a blue screen with error code information) Solution available? : No (see Next steps) What does this error mean? : Windows has encountered an error from which it cannot recover and needs to restart Cause : Unknown device driver Computer symptoms : A message appears on a blue screen with error code information (for example: e.g. 0x0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) i have just turned off automatic reboot to see if i really get a blue screen, and to see if it gives me any clues. windows is not giving me anything to go on here at all. how much faith should i put in this error description? is it likely to be software or hardware? last time one of my computers got this problem it spent 9 months bouncing back and forward between various people, never being fixed, before i finally gave in and purchased a whole new box, this one :mad: zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
as "luck" would have it i have brought home an 80gig external USB2 hard drive from work to move some large files back and forward between two machines. i plugged the drive into the computer after making the above post, using a port on the PCI USB2 card i had fitted. i had the card lying around unused, and more USB ports are always useful. the hard drive was detected just fine, i accessed it and deleted some files quite happily. then i started a 7 gig data move onto the drive. 2 minutes into the move i got a hard lockup in Windows. mouse would not move, no screen updates, keyboard lights would not toggle, CTRL-ALT-DEL did nothing. i left it 5 minutes, no change. i was forced to do a hard reset. machine comes up, reconnect the USB drive to the same port on the expansion card and set the same transfer going, this time as a copy, see, i did learn something. i was getting a terrible data transfer rate for USB2, and then a few minutes into the copy another hard lock! :wtf: :mad: i have been using this card for (i think) a few months (under 6) with my USB2 pen drive and webcam without any problems. this time i connected the HD to a different USB port, one on the front of the machine (so "built in"). i got a much better data transfer rate, and i have now done over 50 gig of data transfer to and from my machine with no problems at all. i have already removed the PCI USB2 card, since it looks very suspicious. if the external drive was bad why does it work for people at work? why did it work perfectly on a different USB port? however my big question is, does it sound possible that this card was the cause of my problems? since i have had this experience, and have now removed the card, if i get any more spontanious reboots i will do another reformat, to make sure the machine looses all memory of the card. zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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The first two suspects are usually heat and bad RAM, although if it only happens once a week, I think that would rule out hardware since bad hardware doesn't take that long to cause problems. :(
--Mike-- Visual C++ MVP :cool: LINKS~! Ericahist | NEW!! PimpFish | CP SearchBar v3.0 | C++ Forum FAQ
Michael Dunn wrote:
The first two suspects are usually heat and bad RAM, although if it only happens once a week, I think that would rule out hardware since bad hardware doesn't take that long to cause problems.
not neccesarilly, I got an error 65-70hrs into a prime95 marathon burnin test for a CPU OC. Since OS level actions were only in the low single digit percentage range it could've gone weeks before the hardware fault caused a crash.
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as "luck" would have it i have brought home an 80gig external USB2 hard drive from work to move some large files back and forward between two machines. i plugged the drive into the computer after making the above post, using a port on the PCI USB2 card i had fitted. i had the card lying around unused, and more USB ports are always useful. the hard drive was detected just fine, i accessed it and deleted some files quite happily. then i started a 7 gig data move onto the drive. 2 minutes into the move i got a hard lockup in Windows. mouse would not move, no screen updates, keyboard lights would not toggle, CTRL-ALT-DEL did nothing. i left it 5 minutes, no change. i was forced to do a hard reset. machine comes up, reconnect the USB drive to the same port on the expansion card and set the same transfer going, this time as a copy, see, i did learn something. i was getting a terrible data transfer rate for USB2, and then a few minutes into the copy another hard lock! :wtf: :mad: i have been using this card for (i think) a few months (under 6) with my USB2 pen drive and webcam without any problems. this time i connected the HD to a different USB port, one on the front of the machine (so "built in"). i got a much better data transfer rate, and i have now done over 50 gig of data transfer to and from my machine with no problems at all. i have already removed the PCI USB2 card, since it looks very suspicious. if the external drive was bad why does it work for people at work? why did it work perfectly on a different USB port? however my big question is, does it sound possible that this card was the cause of my problems? since i have had this experience, and have now removed the card, if i get any more spontanious reboots i will do another reformat, to make sure the machine looses all memory of the card. zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
I think you may also check your PC power supply, sometimes, the Power supply became unstable due to life time. I don't know what's the model of your power supply. usually, you have to consider your power supply after any upgrade your pc hardware. I just have a quick look on your post, you should got two pc, right? using the power supply of stable one to run the other.