The thought occured to me that I can't think of a reason why the auto-reboot on crash fature of XP is useful.

On the other hand, I can think of a reason that it isn't. Namely, that you can't see why it crashed, and so if it enters a cycle of starting and crashing out while loading, you stand little chance of fixing it sometimes, even if the problem itself is entirely fixable.

What are your thoughts on this?

Still using 2K here.

ah, of course. I forgot about the server functionality of XP (Pro in particular, don't know about home)

But still, it would be very useful if it displayed the screen at least for a few seconds.

I always disable the auto reboot. It's always nice to know on what Windows crashed this time

My friend's toshiba satellite is doing the whole cycle of booting and shutting off, the problem is that I cannot disable the automatic restart option because Windows never finishes loading, just loads and then flashes BSOD and restarts before I can even see the problem...I am in the process of getting recovery disks, but I was wondering if you all know a way to disable the automatic restart function without accessing windows..


Thanks!

On some PC's that I've recently installed and/or worked on, in the boot options (press f8 before the windows logo and after it boots from the HDD), there is an option at the bottom of the list to disable the automatic reboot.

I don't know if it's a patch or a service pack edition as I've only had cause to take notice of it once, but I can tell you that it's on some, but not on others. Take a look, and select it if it's there

On that note, it would be useful if somebody knows anything about this option, and can tell me where it comes from. Is it a part of SP2 that I haven't noticed, or is it from a patch after SP2?

I think its bad because you don't have the chance to read the faulty driver, and if you end up in BSOD loop, then it'll be diffcult to pinpoint it.

But the average Joe doesn't want a blue screen with technical info, so maybe thats a good thing.

Thats probably what i would've said too.. giving example of my dad (full noob, just started using pcs) would either tell me "The pc's broken" (which requires poor me some considerably long length of time to convince him all is good and fixed, even if i just did basic glance-through troubleshooting) or just ignored it (the error) if i'm not home and not use it, or call me on my mobile where ever i am.. its a 1 in 3 chance