Re: Sudden Reboot

From: David H. Lipman (DLipman~nospam~_at_Verizon.Net)
Date: 03/10/05 

Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:11:14 -0500

From: "TrickTrash" <guardclone-news@yahoo.co.uk>

| Ever since I installed the latest Microsoft Updates for XP (the 12? new
| security updates following SP 2) I've had a problem with my system suddenly
| rebooting.
| I don't know if the two are related but during the updating process I
| behaved very impatiently: I had only just turned on Auto-Updating & didn't
| pay real attention, so didn't bother to understand it. I kept stopping it,
| trying to cancel it & generally buggering about. (Don't ask me why, just a
| wally I guess.) Eventually I got them installed. Anyway, I uninstalled each
| of these updates but still had the same problem. So now I've reinstalled
| them. What all that's worth, I don't know. But now you know.
|
| What seems to happen is that the system seems to come up against an OS
| problem or conflict, I think, decides to give up the ghost and reboot. This
| most often happens with IE, when I try to go to a new website, whether
| following a link or opening a new page. Somtimes immediately after dial-up
| to my Home Page. Also, load times have increased hugely & sometimes it just
| hangs forever, with the IE progress bar stalled part way, though the
| computer still responds outside of IE. It doesn't seem to happen with
| Firefox, but I've been getting far more 'Can't find server' messages there,
| which I'm suspicious of.
|
| It's not just related to IE however. It also happens when I'm offline;
| what seems to happen is, whilst it's doing something I ask of it, whether OS
| based or some independant application, I try to interact with the shell/OS
| components & it decides it's had enough again, gives up the ghost & reboots.
|
| Beyond those bare facts I can't put my finger on anything more specific,
| other than to say that, using X-Setup Pro, I've got the Windows Desktop &
| Folder Windows "running in a separate process," if that matters. I have
| tried running it without these options, but it doesn't seem to make a
| difference, it's just that I think the problem is somewhere in there. And I
| suspect that it's easily fixable if I know which settings to tinker with.
| But that's just a feeling in my waters.
|
| I need some help to point me in the direction of what to investigate. I
| don't know enough to narrow this down -I wouldn't describe myself as a
| novice, more like a rank up from that, but being self-taught, there are huge
| gaps in my understanding.
|
| I had just done a clean install after updating several hardware components &
| the system was working really well.
|
| I'm pretty sure it's not to do with a virus/worm or other nasty; I'm fairly
| security minded & run these programs in memory:
|
| Microsoft Antispyware
| AVG AntiVirus
| Pest Patrol
| TrojanHunter
| SpywareGuard
| SpywareBlaster
| ZoneAlarm Security Suite, with AntiVirus
|
| And I regularly run scans of these:
|
| Ad-Aware
| Spybot
| ewido Security Suite
| Ghostbuster
| The Cleaner
| Stinger
| CoolWebShredder
| HijackThis
|
| And I recently did a TrendMicro online scan. Of course I realise I could
| still be infected, but if I am, have no idea what to do about it beyond the
| above.
|
| I'm using XP Pro & have a dial-up connection.
|
| --
| TrickTrash
|

If a PC suddenly just "reboots" w/o an error message you most likely having a hardware
problem; CPU, CPU FAN, memory modules, etc. 

-- 
Dave