Why does my windows Xp Keep rebooting Itself?

[gregg1983]

Hi I am new to the forums and website for that matter. I have a problem that is driving me crazy.

Our IT guy at work built me a pc about a year ago with Windows Xp (Pro) installed and for the first few months everything was fine. Then one day the damn thin started rebooting itself for no reason. I put this down to a virus or something I picked up on the net. After running numerous virus checkers and spy sweepers (all in safe mode aswell) the problem never disappeared.

So I bit the bullet and formatted the hard drive and started from scratch. But this time i installed Win 98SE as I had no XP disk. The weird thing is that the PC ran perfectly with Win 98 and I was quite content.....

But I picked up a good deal on ebay for a Win XP Home edition on ebay a couple of weeks ago and couldn't resist. So again I reformatted and did a fresh install of Win XP. Then the problems began again...

The rebooting is totally random and I cant seem to put it down to 1 particular thing. It will reboot when downloading (usually files of 100MB+), ripping music, playing DVD's, playing games, and sometimes even just when idle.

I have ran Memtest for 12 hours straight and it reported no errors whatsoever, Asus probe reports that the CPU temp is never over 55 degrees.

So I have went back to Win 98SE again. But I recently Asus probe has been flashing up warnings of the +12V being too high when playin BF1942 (13.48V to be precise) could this be the cause of the constant rebooting in XP?

All I know of the system specs are:

Athlon 2500 (not overclocked)
Asus A7v600 Motherboard
1028MB PC3200 400MHZ DDR RAM
Radeon 9800SE GFX Card


Do you think a new PSU will sort the problems? If so would you recommend any models?

 

[poertner_1274]

Have you checked to make sure all of your hardware is compatible with XP? I haven't run into any problems with things that aren't "certified for XP", but you might be. It could also very well be that your PSU can't supply everything you have in your box. Do you know how many watts your current PSU is? Also how many HDD's do you have, and DVD/CD drives? All this adds up to take a toll on the PSU.

BTW
:wave:Welcome to TechSpot:wave:

 

[olefarte]

And another Welcome to TechSpot

Here's a handy little tool to help you calculate how much power you need.

 

[gregg1983]

I only have 1 'Barracuda 7200.7 80Gigabyte HDD' and a 'Pioneer DVR-106 DVD Re-writer' But Im afraid I have no idea what wattage the PSU is. Is there any easy way of checking?

With regards to XP compatability I also have no idea, maybe worth doing a few searches on the net to see if anythin pops up. But I find it strange that everything was fine + stable for the first few months.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I find it strange that everything was fine + stable for the first few months.

The junk in the registry keeps increasing every day.

 

[gregg1983]

I always run reg mechanic and registry tweaker programs and the problem still returns. I did send an error report to microsoft and it confirmed that it's a faulty hardware problem, but never pointed out what hardware! No suprises there huh?

I just don't understand how win 98 runs lyk a dream with not a single BSOD, whereas XP only lasts 5mins before rebooting.

I'll never figure these things out.

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

Take the side panel off your case and you should be able to see what the wattage of your psu is.

Right click on my computer and select properties, then the advanced tab, and under startup and recovery click on settings, and uncheck the box that says automatically restart. click apply ok.

Now instead of your system rebooting itself you should receive an error message telling you what caused the problem. Pay particular attention to any drivers identified in the stop message.

Have you tested you Ram?

If not then download and run Memtest86+ let it run for at least seven passes.

If you don`t have a floppy drive there is an ISO version that you can burn to cd.

www.memtest.org.

One of the reasons why Windows 98 may run ok but not XP is that XP is a lot more system intensive. Also as Poertner says it it possible that you have some sort of hardware incompatability.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

 

[gregg1983]

Thanks for all you help guys.

The PSU has ' Total output is 350W max' on it. Is this too low?

I've unchecked the 'auto-restart' box in the settings a couple of weeks ago but didn't help at all. The only difference was that the screen went all blue instead of rebooting. There was no text or error messages, the whole thing locked up and I had to restart manually.

The only error msg I get is when the OS prompts to send a notification to Microsoft after the comp has rebooted.

Yep I have used Memtest for over 12 hours overnight. got to something like 1,700% with no errors at all.

I'm still checking on the incompatability issue. Hopefully it will be something cheap to replace as im totally skint! I've just bought a copy of Win 2K now so hopefully that will work ok, otherwise it looks like i'm gonna be stuck back in good old 98 for a few years to come. LOL

 

[The_Fly_UK]

Hi Gregg, I'm new here too, and i have the same problem with my fathers pc, I had to format his HD after a very nasty virus, installed xp with sp2, everything was ok for about 3-4 hours, then it started freezing up or rebooting, it is rebooting before windows screen even comes up, His pc is running on the same PSU as yours.

I must admit We did put in more memory and a larger Graphix card a couple of weeks ago, but everything seemed fine.

Like a fool i never thought about upgrading the psu, and i think thats whats wrong with it,

So this week im going to change the PSU so i will let you know if there is any dif with the machine.

Thanx FLY