I'm installing things on my new computer and it has an annoying habit of rebooting all by itself when I'm in the middle of doing something.

I have never experienced this type of thing before.

This computer has XP Pro on it.  My laptop had XP Home but never did that.  And my old computer had Windows 2000 and didn't do it either.

I did a search on the internet and found something about turning off "auto reboot" which I went and did, but it's still doing it.

So far all I've been doing is surfing the net between sites that I'm a member of, installing hardware and software, and copying over saved content from CD to my hard drive.

I notice that it's happening when I'm searching for files on my hard drive as well as when I'm copying files from CD to hard drive. I haven't noticed it do it any other time.  When I'm copying over CD content I can get through 2 or sometimes 3 CDs before it reboots, but haven't been able to do more than that without it rebooting.

Also, I'm not sure if it's a memory issue or not, but I seem to have problems with my Mozilla-Firefox browser and the spell check feature.  Periodically every word I  type is underlined in red indicating incorrect spelling. If I close my browser and reboot my computer the problem is fixed.

Is there some setting in XP Pro that I need to change in order to stop my computer from rebooting or is this something I need to talk to the computer store about?  It doesn't seem like a big deal but it's very annoying to have your computer just shut down on you in the middle of a task.

Oh no Acadia, my heart goes out to you after all the problems you've had.
When you install some programs they need to reboot to install properly before you can use them. They should however warn you and ask you if you want to reboot.
Does it reboot right after you install something?
This isn't normal behaviour and I suggest you go through the awful process of contacting the support people (again).
Maybe someone else here can give you a more educated opinion.
Best of luck.

This is a hardware problem.
First get a memory checker and run it in its most thorough setting (the timings of your memory may not be correct).
Next check the power supply (it may be too small, should be at least 450 watt).
Finally it can be a problem with the hard disk or graphics adapter.

Altough unlikely it could also be a problem with one of the drivers (make sure you have the latest released drivers [no beta versions] ).

Good luck, go to the computer store and have them fix it.

This is a brand new computer and I wouldn't be taking responsibility for any of its problems.
Call the support people and complain, strongly.

Attached Link: http://www.askyewolfe.com/Removal-of-Spell-or-Curse.html

I swear that someone has put a VooDoo curse on me for something!  :blink:  You all need to go to the above link and help me get rid of it, hehe

I'll call the computer place tomorrow.  They're very nice so I don't anticipate a problem with getting it resolved.  My only concern is that if it is a hard drive that I have to go through all of my installations again  cries  At least I don't have to spend 12 hours on the phone with tech support trying to fix it myself.

I have 2 Gigs of memory so I can't see it being a problem with not enough memory.

As for the hard drive?  Ugh!  I'll have to back it all up onto my external drive. Thank God I decided to buy a bigger one.  LOL

I think the power supply is 350 watt.

Ashley, the problem isn't after I install programs. I'm finished doing all of that. The problem is happening randomly while I'm copying content from CDs and stuff.  I haven't even used any of my programs that I've installed yet.

Think you can have them back up the current hd, onto the new hard drive before doing anything that way you save whatever you've done so far.

I'll still back it up just in case!  With my luck with computers these days one can never be too careful!  LOL

Right click 'my computer', --> properties --> advanced --> startup and recovery --> settings.

Here make sure 'automatically restart' is unchecked.

After you have turned off the 'auto restart' it should give you a blue screen instead of a reboot. In that there should be something like "stop error " . Search for that line in google (like 'stop error 0x12345abcdef') to see whats up.

If you have turned it off, and the thing still does a  reboot then this is most probably a a power problem.. If it were anything else, RAM, HDD, anything, windows XP always throws that blue screen before it crashes.

What display card do you have anyway ? If its a high end one, those have very high power requirements, a 350w PSU may not be enough. What you need to watch for is how much amps (A) the PSU has on its +12 V line. Good quality PSUs have this listed on their side covers. You want a PSU with at least 25-30 A on +12 V for it to work reliably with modern display cards. The 'wattage' figure of a PSU is pretty useless as a measure since its the actual Amps on the 12v that are important (the +12V line runs most of the components of the system, the CPU, HDD, the display, DVD drives etc)

Quote - Right click 'my computer', --> properties --> advanced --> startup and recovery --> settings.

Here make sure 'automatically restart' is unchecked.

After you have turned off the 'auto restart' it should give you a blue screen instead of a reboot. In that there should be something like "stop error " . Search for that line in google (like 'stop error 0x12345abcdef') to see whats up.

If you have turned it off, and the thing still does a  reboot then this is most probably a a power problem.. If it were anything else, RAM, HDD, anything, windows XP always throws that blue screen before it crashes.

What display card do you have anyway ? If its a high end one, those have very high power requirements, a 350w PSU may not be enough. What you need to watch for is how much amps (A) the PSU has on its +12 V line. Good quality PSUs have this listed on their side covers. You want a PSU with at least 25-30 A on +12 V for it to work reliably with modern display cards. The 'wattage' figure of a PSU is pretty useless as a measure since its the actual Amps on the 12v that are important (the +12V line runs most of the components of the system, the CPU, HDD, the display, DVD drives etc)

I did that automatically restart thing before I posted.  I didn't get an error message the next time it rebooted. It just powered down, my monitor said something about "please wait. optimizing image" (what image I have no idea because I wasn't working with any images, just copying CD content), and then it powered down and then back up again.

I'm not sure what kind of graphic card I have.  After speaking with several people I decided to go with just a cheaper card ($75,00) because I was told that for the type of graphics that I do that it would be more than adequate and that I don't need to spend $600.00 on a top of the line card because those are more geared for high animations and 3D games, neither of which I use.

You lost me with the talk about amps.  How do I know what my computer is using?

If you go to the Start - Control Panel - System - Hardware (tab) - Device Manager (button) - and look under display adapters it will show you what graphics card you have. It might not tell you the exact brand name but it will give you like Radeon 9600 series which mine is. Then if you go on the google and search it will tell you its from ATI.

For a graphics card its true you don't need to spend $600.00 but you can def get a good one without going crazy either. Its hard to say from what your saying your prob is cause it could be memory related, power, video card, driver or a few other things. That is one of the probs with puters that makes you want to pull your hair out believe me I know from experience. Hopefully you can get this resovled and if a blue screen does come up please write down the code and give to us and we might be able to help you out also.

Thanks :)

I have  Nvidia Geforce  7300 GS

Hi Acadia

I've found a couple of things have helped me when I get this sort of problem.

Have you switched off 'indexing' on the hard drives?
This is always one of the first things that I do.

The other thing could be a peculiar install of an AntiVirus program.
What AntiVirus have you got installed?

Do you happen to have the PC plugged in to a  UPS (uninteruptable power supply)?  I had a bad connection on the communication cable between it and PC, which was shutting my PC down.  The software would see the connection disappear and think I was on battery power and then shut my PC off.  If not, the problem sounds like either a drive conflict between the CD and HD or one of the 2 devices is defective.  That's why it reboots when you'r copying CD's.  That would be my guess without actually seeing it happen.  But as someone else suggested.  I'd make the place you bought it from figure it out.

Irene
  

We had this problem also and it turned out to be the power supply.  Some sort of protection, when it was failing so you did not hurt your hard drive, it would reboot, but it was a bad power supply.  Sharen

Quote - Have you switched off 'indexing' on the hard drives?
This is always one of the first things that I do.

The other thing could be a peculiar install of an AntiVirus program.
What AntiVirus have you got installed?

What exactly is "indexing"?  If it's something important that is needed for my restore point, then I don't think I want to turn that off.

I'll try reinstalling my antivirus program and see if that helps.  I use e-Trust Antivirus and have done so for years. I used the free beta version of it when it was called something else. I really like it and it hasn't let me down in all of the time I've been using it.

Quote - Do you happen to have the PC plugged in to a  UPS (uninteruptable power supply)?  I had a bad connection on the communication cable between it and PC, which was shutting my PC down.  The software would see the connection disappear and think I was on battery power and then shut my PC off.

Actually, I think I am. I have my computer connected to an APC power bar that has battery backup and I have it plugged into the power surge/battery backup area instead of just the power surge. I'll plug it into my other power surge bar and see if that helps.

Quote - We had this problem also and it turned out to be the power supply.  Some sort of protection, when it was failing so you did not hurt your hard drive, it would reboot, but it was a bad power supply.  Sharen

I'm thinking that's all it is too. I'm not getting any blue screens of death since having turned off auto restart, and it only seems to happen when I'm doing something intensive like copying large batches of files from CDs to my hard drive, or searching the hard drive (that's all I've done so far).  For the past couple of hours I've just been moving around small amounts of files between drives and the computer hasn't shut itself down while I've been doing those little tasks.

I'll  if these ideas don't fix it, then I'll call them tomorrow about it. I don't mind paying additional to have a better power supply put in if that's the case, but if they try charging me labour in order to change out the power supply I'll kick up a fuss because I specifically asked for a large enough power supply to run my system and if it's shutting down because of an inadequate power supply, then that's not "adequate". I will pay the difference between the cost of this one and a better one though.

Anyway, I'll see what they say.

350 watt power supply? That is plainly not enough. It should be at least 450 watt, preferably 500 or more.

What many people (even legitimate PC assemblers) do is try to pass off crappy PSUs to their customers by telling them that it is 400w or 500w or whatever, but in reality it is usually some no brand unit that has a very low 12V value. Since most people dont pay much attention to what PSU is going in their system, they are able to get away with it quite often too.

I had a computer do something similiar. Boot up and then shut back down. After spending 50 bucks to have it checked out and told it was working fine for them (not for me when I got it back home, though...was still doing it), a friend came over when it was doing that, unplugged my mouse and it stopped. I bought a new mouse and never had the problem again.

There is a virus or worm around that makes the system boot constantly...  have you good virus program??  have you used a registry cleaner and spy ware software...?

I used Dr. Web's cureit to see if it was a virus or trojan, but it came up clean as I expected. I also ran an adware scan and no adware either.

It's only doing it when I'm doing something more intensive than just posting or surfing the net.  All I've been doing on this thing for 2 days now is surfing the net, copying files from CD and running folder/file searches to locate .zip files that I need to unzip.

The computer only reboots during the copying for files from CDs and once or twice while I was running a search for folders/files. It hasn't rebooted on its own any other time.

Last night I was moving small numbers of files between hard drives and folders and I managed to go a few hours without it rebooting.  I started to copy more files from CDs and when I was on the second or third CD it rebooted part way through the copying process.

Sounds like you're starting to pin the trouble down to the CD drive...
Have you checked the cables to the CD drive at both ends?  Solidly
plugged in?  Give them a wiggle or two for superstition's sake?

Jumpers on the back of the CD drive solidly planted? 

Beyond that, is an updated driver, or a driver better suited for Vista,
available for the drive?

Indexing is a "feature" to make searches quicker. The idea is to build up an index of the contents of your drive in the background then when you do a search only that index has to be searched and not the whole drive.

The problem is that the background indexer sometimes seems to pounce on a newly written file before the program doing the writing has finished with it, leading to a conflict. Thats why I suspect the Indexing in this case.

There is no harm at all in switching it off, you can still do searches as usual.

In My computer, right click on the drive, go to properties and untick the indexing box. Do that for each drive and whenever you add a new drive.

Go to "Start->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Event Viewer

This is a log of your machine.

If you have a hard disk problem, you will see a whole bunch of Red Xs under Applications or System (not sure which) indicating that the computer had trouble reading from your disk. If it's a CD-Rom problem, it will tell you there too.

Look around both of those for any Red Xs, and maybe you will find the culprit.

It sounds to me like something is bad. Either a driver (it could be your bus driver for the hard disk  or CD-Drive bus) or the device itself is bad. Bad disks usually show problems relatively shortly after you start using it- however, if your machine only started using the region where there are bad sectors, it wouldn't have had any reason to complain before. Also, a bad connection can cause all sorts of problems. Open the machine up (or have a friend who doesn't mind doing it, if you don't feel comfortable) and check that all of the wires are firmly seated. These can come lose during any sort of travel.

Good luck. This doesn't sound fun:(

eric

Volts? Watts? ain't them 2 different (but related things?...;)

E= I/R - all the electronics I remember...;)

12V should be the internal feed to the system board and/or components. What a power supply does is convert  external power (over here, 110V/60Hz) AC down to 12,5 (+/-), and other voltages DC internally (I haven't had to worry about that since the 90s, but that's what I remember) using (I think) a rectifier.

I'd agree that a larger Power supply wouldn't hurt, and it's possible to get bamboozled in some situations by 'specs' on an item (how many people have seen '500 Watt' PC speakers the size of  a coffee cup? I look at my 100W keyboard amp [the size of a thigh-high amplifier] and wonder who's zoomin' who..;)

Whatever the problem turns out to be, back up early and often. the indexing thing probably creates a large file or files, and that it may not be necessary (but I'm still on Win 2k..;)

good luck.

Quote - Sounds like you're starting to pin the trouble down to the CD drive...

Ok, it's not the CD Drive. I didn't take the cover off and look, but I was copying  my 1.6 gig "My Documents" folder to my extra drive and it rebooted part way through the copying. Again, no blue screen, it just powered down and rebooted itself.

Frustrating as all heck. I'll never be able to move stuff from my hard drive to the external one at this rate.

Another possibility: does the machine get too hot? Or maybe the temperature thresholds are set too low?
Intensive disk use, including CDs, generates heat. The machine might get too hot inside.
Most likely you can monitor system temperature in the BIOS setup - just press DEL, ESC or F2 during boot (depends on the BIOS). The menu uption is usually called Hardware Monitor. You can check the temperature of mainboard and CPU, and set the thresholds for shutdown/restart on temperature and/or fan speed.

Ok, I think I finally found the problem!  crosses fingers

I did reinstall my firewall and antivirus program earlier as was suggested. I used the saved files I had on a CD.

Now having gone to the error log I see a whole bunch of red X's that say "True Vector Service" and I recognized that from my firewall and / or antivirus program.  So I turned off both and managed to copy the "My Documents" folder 3 or 4 times without my computer rebooting.

I tried to get to the Computer Associates site to see if t here is a more current version of both programs, but I'm currently getting errors when trying to login there so I'll have to try tomorrow. I can live without a firewall because I have a router, but I definitely can't do without my antivirus software.

Hopefully this really is the solution and that there isn't anything wrong with my nice shiney new computer after all!  :)  I know I've been super unlucky lately but man, there has to be some good luck due to come my way,  LOL

svdl, the computer hasn't gotten even mildly warm thus far.  But...I just finished installing my last runtime and  I think I'll try taking Poser for a spin and see how it does!  I'll let you all know the result.

One side note... Instead of a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) when Windows locks up, XP will usually catch the bad condition and force a reboot if it can. If it's a pre-install (yuck**), it may be one of those additional "value added" programs the manufacturer tries to chuck in there causing a problem. If you can, and the manufacturer wasn't dumb enough to rely on a "restore partition", re-install the OS from scratch. If you can do it w/o adding all those silly programs that say, HP or Dell chuck in there, even better. /P ** The only time I'll ever use a pre-installed operating system is when I buy a Mac, because OSX and its proggies were specifically built for the box. Anything else? I flush the hard drive completely and totally, then do an install of just the OS (I usually put Linux or FreeBSD in there anyway, but even back when I used Windows it was the same story).

This is a local build so I don't have all of that extra stuff on my computer.  I hated the fact that Dell had so many gigs dedicated to their nonsense.

Well, here are a few more pennies, just for giggles:P

Your AV software is probably working like crazy to analyze all those new files you are pouring onto that hard disk. It could be erroring out because of the load, or causing a conflict with one of the other applications. Zone Alarm might actually be interfering with it's ability to figure out what a PZ3 file is or something.

I recommend adding your runtimes as safe folders in your antivirus programs. It's highly unlikely that a virus will target them, and you should be scanning anything prior to installation- so it's a reasonable option. It will also speed up load time for your favorite items, since your antivirus program doesn't have to first scan the file before poser gets it.

Sounds to me like you found the problem. Just to be sure, though, I would run something really hard on that machine for hours. Make sure to fill up the ram and work the processor for a few hours. If you have vue or bryce, render something really complicated. If not, I'm sure you can coax poser into overextending itself and working for hours on a render:P Just make sure it's maxed out and stays busy for a couple of hours. If it bluescreens or restarts during that, you probably have a hardware problem that only showed up when you worked the machine really hard (by scanning tons of files for viruses). If it survives it, you probably did have a software problem.

Good luck:)

eric

The folks above that said: "the power supply" are 100% correct!!!  Your 7300  has it's  own power  hookup  from your power  supply  and  the  350  watt  PS  is  definately  not  up  snuff!!!!  Had the same thing happen to me and I slapped in a 500 watt PS and haven't had the problem since!!!

Gerard