Random Restart, Random Blue Screen

[dwightfry]

A few months ago my computer started randomly restarting. It would always occur within the first 5 min. of being on the computer. It didn't happen very often, so I didn't worry about it as much as I should have, but now it is getting VERY bad. It restarts almost immediatly when I first turn on the computer.

It will be loading, and checking the drives, and it will restart, sometimes it makes it to the login screen...and it will restart, sometimes I login, and a right when It finishes loading it will restart.

or

Instead of restarting, the whole screen will just turn blue. No writing or anything, and Ctr+Alt+Del doesn't work, I have to manually restart. This all happens while loading or immediatly after loading also.

and

When It runs the scandisk while loading it freezes half of the time. I will let it run the scans on the harddrives, and when it finishes it will freeze, or I'll press a key to skip the scan and it will freeze.

DOES ANYBODY HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT'S WRONG?!?!?!?

My only thought is that my harddrive is going bad. Any chance reformatting will fix this problem?

[CornerPocket]

1st thought, how is the cooling in the system? If your heatsink fan is failing and not cooling properly perhaps the system is shutting down to avoid damage to cpu/motherboard.


It's best to trouble shoot before going to the extreme of formatting. Any recent new devices added? driver updates perhaps? Try running the system with just the video card installed, see what reactions you get, if it runs okay add another device one by one, maybe a bad device or conflict. Memory, more than one stick in the system?? test them one at a time..................btw, what are your system specs?

[dwightfry]

That thought crossed my mind also, but it restarts so quickly I figuared that wasn't it. If I can go for more than 10 min without it restarting, then It won't restart at all...or at least hasn't yet. I checked the fans, and they are running.

512 ram
1.4 ghtz
60 gig hardrive (XP installed)
6 gig hardrive (98 Installed)
Geforce 2 64mb videocard

[bigdawgfoxx]

hey...I had this problem..somehow a box gets ckecked that AUTOMATICLY restarts your computer when it recieves a fatal error....it happens all the time so it will restart a lot...i called dell and they told me how to fix it, but i dont remember...lol sorry...ill email you prob if i figure it out! hope i can remember

[harrycary]

I haven't a clue but there is a way to disable Windows XP from restarting during system failure.

right click "my computer", go into "properties"

click the "advanced" tab

go into "startup and recovery"

unclick the the appropriate box under "system failure"

If it's a Windows issue you may get an idea of where the problem lies.

Good luck with it...