computer gremlins

[arethinn]

A winner is NOT me.

Besides doing the "normal" stop-in-the-middle-of-boot thing today, after 6 days of normal boot (which it hadn't managed before, and which lulled me into a false sense of security), yesterday and today it has done spontaneous restarts in the middle of me typing kinds of things. Last night enotsola said it is possible for XP to do this with no warning when it generates a certain kind of internal error message or whatever, so on one occasion I didn't worry too much, but a repeat performance today beggars the reason of that.

So. Gremlins then. (No offence to any in the audience.) Seems to me at this point that it has got to be a motherboard gremlin of some kind; I suppose in theory it could be a peripheral, but I have no idea how I would ever ferret that out. I also am aware of no way of knowing whether it is motherboard strictly (which I am somewhat inclined to) or rather the CPU, aside from replacing it first and waiting a while to see if it's fixed, but that's hardly cost effective as buying mobo-CPU combos is cheaper than buying each separately (of course I'd have to get new memory too, since my current memory wouldn't work in a P4 board :-P ).

Ugh.

*frequently saves file she's working on*

Comments

[sevenstar.livejournal.com]

My own theory: memory chips fault.

[arethinn]

Hrm. Maybe I should turn the memory test back on. I generally keep it off after the first 10 or so successful boots with new memory since testing half a gig adds significant time (in terms of percentage) into the boot time. Good point tho.

[soundwave106.livejournal.com]

In the control panel / system / advanced / startup and recovery / settings (whew!), you may want to see if "Automatically restart" is checked. If it is, on Blue Screen Of Death (TM) errors, XP will automatically restart as you say. I always leave this unchecked, at least I know what screws up XP when a problem occurs.

[arethinn]

OK, unchecked, but somehow I don't think this is it, given the pattern of problems up to this point.

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

You've already checked to make sure your CPU is adequately cooled, right? (I know, I may well ahve suggested this a few months ago... it's been a while, I'm blond, I forget things...)

Anyway, with spontaneous reboots, I tend to check the cooling fans first. Partly because they're often the problem, and partly because they're really cheap to add new ones. Of course, if it spontaneously reboots, then runs fine for hours, it's probably not a heat/cooling problem.

In that case, I'd look at the RAM next. Aside from your BIOS RAM check, you might want to look around on someplace like TUCOWS or your other favored shareware/freeware download site and find some hardware diagnostic programs, and have them run a thorough check on your memory. That's a lot cheaper than actually going out and buying new stuff without being sure that's the problem.

[arethinn]

You've already checked to make sure your CPU is adequately cooled, right?

I hadn't, but as far as I can tell, it is. The CMOS utility says it's 96 F, which seems reasonable to me, and that the fan is spinning 5300-5500 RPM; I also recently (as in, last Sunday) blew the dust off the blades of the CPU fan and the case fan and the pins of the "heatsink" thing, as well as cleaned out the tribble that tends to collect in the front "grille" (since my computer sits on the floor), so... I doubt this is it.

I know, I may well ahve suggested this a few months ago

Well, to my recollection I wasn't even talking about this a few months ago, so unless you are the psychic geek... ;)

find some hardware diagnostic programs

K. suggestion taken on board.

[rhiannasilel.livejournal.com]

You're running XP, then? Are you running pro or home? Home really sucks. You know this guy I used to work with had this problem after installing updates. Did you perform updates? This could very well be the problem. SP2, particularly blows chunks in that regard and tends to crash a lot of things. You could try reinstalling Windows and then install the updates one at a time and test it that way. It'll be a real pain in the ass, but it might just work.

[arethinn]

XP Pro. I installed SP2 many moons ago and have not had any trouble with anything until the recent strangeness, so I really doubt that's it. (I have never had crashing problems with Windows; never quite understood peoples' ranting about 98SE, even. Always ran fine for me. So did 2K and so has XP.)