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

[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.

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

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.)