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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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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*
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*
no subject
Date: Feb. 6th, 2005 09:27 am (UTC)From: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.
no subject
Date: Feb. 6th, 2005 09:56 am (UTC)From: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.