Acadia opened this issue on Feb 24, 2007 · 31 posts
Acadia posted Sat, 24 February 2007 at 2:15 AM
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?
"It is good to see ourselves as
others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we
are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not
angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to
say." - Ghandi