Computer re-sarting for no reason

Oriel

Folks,
For some reason, my computer keeps restarting for no reason whatsoever. Thing is - it's never when I'm actually using it. Problem is - I'll go to bed, leaving it on to listen to music. By the time I wake up in the morning, it'll be restarted and asking for my BIOS password.

Since it doesn't happen when I'm using it, I'm ruling out a processor, overheating, or RAM problem.
More likely, it's going to be some installed software doing the buggering. *Sinecure looks towards Symantec*.

Question is - is there a way of finding a record of what might be happening to cause it to crash? I think I remember seeing something like this is the "Computer Management" console, but I can't for the life of me find it now. The ony thing I have to go by so far is the "Your system as recovered from a serious error..." message. But this leads me to log file which doesn't seem to make any sense at all - much be a hardware refernce or something.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
S.

muffen

Check the eventlog, go in the Bios and make sure your RAM and CPU are clocked correctly (if you're overclocking, put it back to standard settings).

I find it unlikely it would reboot because of a software problem, although I guess it is possible (devicedriver problem may cause it, but "normal" software is unlikely to)

unkel

What OS? Can you give a complete breakdown of the hardware? Also the software you are using

joePC

If your using XP:

1. go to control panel

2. Select system

3. Click the Advanced Tab

4. Under Startup and recovery, select Settings

5. Under System Failure unchech the Restart Automatically

6. Click OK then apply

Problem should be solved........

Thanks joePC

Big Chief

my old computer used to do this, it was because of the power management settings in control panel, when i set it to standby after say 1 hour my system would reboot (that or the monitor wouldnt come out of standby..) for some reason..

i put all the options in there to "never" and that got rid of the problem for me

Oriel

Thanks for the replies.

Big Chief, the PC was set to stand by for 4 hours, so I've changed that. So I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

JoePC, when I unticked the restart option, I woke to find the computer just had crashed, just a black screen, no response from anything. I so still need to find the source of the crash.

Muffen, there's nothing in the eventlog giving me any indication as to what went wrong.

I'm hoping the power options will fix the problem.

S.

TacT

power saving under windoze has to be one of the biggest resource hoggers and downright useless features of any OS.

If you do any overclocking, it will reset default speeds to your gfx card when it wakes up.
If you play any games you'll notice they run at half the speed with any kind of power saving enabled.
It can also cause problems as you've mentioned. I'd suspect the power saving before anything else. If it's not the power saving it's whatever driver you loaded recently that's causing the problem.

anyhooo, right click my computer/advanced/startup+recovery uncheck box to automatically reboot if there's any error and next time this happens it will blue screen with an error message, that will tell you what's going on that's causing the problem.