PC randomly restarts

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IBM PC (2257-82U)
128 MB RAM
1.0 GHz
sound, video, nic on board
modem PCI card

machine is as is from factory ~ 2 years ago

recently has been rebooting at random with increasing frequency

thought this could be RAM but substituted for another chip and problems were the same... repartitioned and formatted hard drive and it hangs during device detection phase of XP install... now is rebooting before the OS loads

not sure if this is overheating problem or not, seemed to be the prime suspect but I shut it down for several hours then started it up with the case off and a fan blowing a full throttle and it still couldn't get past the OS

booted it with a DOS boot disk and let it idle for some hours and it was fine

any ideas?
 
I had the same sort of problem, and I think it was due to my XP install being corrupted. I put the XP CD back in the cd rom and repaired my existing install of XP. This took care of the problem, and I'm still not sure exactly why it started. Anyway give that a try.
I think the options I was going to just format and reinstall, but when I went to do that it checked for existing versions of Microsoft OS and if found my XP install that was corrupted, and asked if I wanted to repair it by pressing 'R' So I did and all is well now. I hope this helps in a way.


But if not, what new software have you installed recently that could be tied to this?
 
I tried to do a repair and a reinstall both but neither could complete successfully as the random reboots continue during the install process.

No new software installed since early September (Ad-aware v6).

I am quite sure that it is a hardware problem, not a software problem.
 
Well my problem of the same nature was due to 2 busted capacitors on my motherboard. Take a look closely at things inside the case and see if anything is out of the norm.
 
If it's 2 years old you probably have a large buildup of dust on your heatsinks and in the power supply. A good blasting with an airhose would be in order. I take mine into work every 6 months and blow it out with compressed air. A can of compressed air will work but it's just not the same as a 100 PSI hosing.
 
this is an easy fix. you have a driver that is failing and blue screening xp, except that the default options in xp are to auto reboot and not show the blue screen anymore, they started this after getting so many complaints about blue screens of death, so M$ said ok well we will just hide that little blue screen. surprise xp is great no more blue screens!

ya right, to turn this off so it wont auto reboot go:

to the properties of the my computer icon, or the system icon in control panel.

then the advanced tab

then the settings button for startup and recovery

then half way down uncheck automatically restart

then reboot, and from now on when the driver and or device kills xp it will give you the blue screen and you can debug what the problem is exactely.

when you get that blue screen and after you get the info you need (driver or hardware name or names, location etc) then use your pc's power button to shut down.

get a new driver, reinstall your driver, or disable the hardware.
 
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