Monitoring sudden reboots

[kroogar]

Anyone know of a way to monitor reboots happening during the night? Sometimes I get back to my PC and realize it's rebooted. For no apparent reason... :-(

I would like to monitor what's causing this.

./kroogar

[pythoncancer]

what windows you are using ? just search log (EVENT VIEWER) of your windows .Google like "how to find event viewer on window____ 8/7/xp"

[kroogar]

It's Win7 Ultimate. I know the event viewer. Maybe that's a place to start. Maybe I can setup a filtered view that only displays reboots...

[dakky]

It's Win7 Ultimate. I know the event viewer. Maybe that's a place to start. Maybe I can setup a filtered view that only displays reboots...

If windows is rebooting you likely have it set to do this automatically on blue screen crashes etc. (auto start up and recovery set under advanced system properties).
If you switch this off it may then hang with the blue screen of death, not reboot, and you can sometimes see useful info on top lines of that blue screen - i.e. a file name or driver that caused crash.

Also memory or heat problems can often cause unexpected system crashes, worth running a memory diag and also a stress test utility (ie prime95) to see if you can cause the crash - once you can cause it to happen the problem is half fixed.... then you can look at doing things to fix it.

All this assumes it is not a simple power line failure/short outage of course ;<)

all best - Dakky

[kroogar]

The machine is brand new... :-O

I'll keep an eye on it and maybe switch to Linux if it gets too bad... thanks for the help :-)

[dakky]

The machine is brand new... :-O

I'll keep an eye on it and maybe switch to Linux if it gets too bad... thanks for the help :-)
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Ah well unfortunately brand new doesn't mean it cant have a hw problem.... but if it's new and you haven't fine tuned the installed W7 setup then for sure it's not setup well - microsoft defaults on installation are one size fits all but never optimised well.... as an example it will be set to auto restart on any errors/crashes - which is ideal for a server but not best for a home system if you are trying to find/fix crash problems....
My advice would still be to stop it auto restarting as I mentioned earlier and do a stress test.
all best - Dakky

Oh should have mentioned if you do go for stress testing install couple hw/temperature monitoring utils first so you can see any issues early such as rising temperature etc. (one I use regularly is HWiNFO64 and its a freeby)