Random restarts?

Not quite sure whats causing it, Been having the problem for a few months now and it's very picky when it decides to restart. It never restarts when i'm playing World of warcraft or counter strike, but i fire up something another game like Grand Theft Auto, and half the time it will restart the computer and the other part of the time, it'll run smoothly. I already went and disabled the "reboot upon system failure" option and to no avail. I never get a error message or anything of the such when it reboots. The time it restarts the most often is when i'm browsing the web in firefox, usually when closing tabs or switching to a different tab. (3.0.13)

I've tried q couple things i found on the forums, cleaning the RAM using a penil eraser, running Ccleaner, antivirus scans, etc, couldn't find a hint of a virus/trojan. I'm just completely dumbfounded as to why it's doing this, and with no errors upon crash or reboot.

I'm running XP home SP3

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

Sorry, no help from me, but I'm having the EXACT same problem. I started a thread (link: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=197970) where I said I thought it was due to a possible power supply issue, but after reading this thread, I realized that the restart seems to only happen when online. So I installed a PCI ethernet card and disabled the on-board ethernet, but that made no difference, and I still get random reboots when online with Internet Explorer. This PC is also running WinXP Home SP3, it's an Emachine C3070 (don't laugh, I know it's old, it's not mine, but it really runs pretty freakin' fast for an aging system) with an upgraded CPU (AthlonXP 3200+), 2gb DDR, and 500gb HD. But the mobo and PSU are original stock EMachine components. I've also done everything the thread starter has done: malware scans are clean, no errors in the event viewer, performed all system maintenance, run in-depth diagnostics on RAM and HD, etc etc etc

I'll be watching this thread closely..... and may just start my own too....

 

Yeah, mines a Dell Inspiron tower, throw together with 512 ram, 1.7ghz processor, 256mb geforce 6200, never had any problems with it before. :cry

2+ months of random restarts kinda gets to ya, especially when it's in the middle of a conversation about my phone bill or whatnot and the computer shuts off ......

 

first thing I would try, since it happens while browsing, is uninstall any toolbars, addons. uninstall adobe flash, java, quicktime, and anything else that's set to run along side a web browser, then reinstall them when needed. have you checked the event viewer for any errors? since it's happening during some games, try updating directx, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

 

I would try 2 things. 1)there was a virus going around a long time ago which just restarted your computer 30 seconds after startup. there is a command which by default gives you 30 seconds before restarting your computer. I don't know if he put this in to a browser to trigger the shutdown. but the abort command is "shutdown /a" which you can copy paste into start, run.

I don't think the first one is really your issue. I did have recently a problem narrowed down to windows update. you can copy paste the following (bet. the quotes) into start run. "sc stop wuauserv" then click ok. if this solves your issue, I'd then try going for a manual windows update, seeing what the problem is.