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Dell XPS restarts/boots at will

S

SanDiegoPC

Senior member
I'm working on a Dell XPS 7100 with an Intel Core2Duo and 2G of RAM. It runs fine and reports no spyware/virus issues. But it will randomly reboot. It's three yrs old and has XP Media Center Edition on it. Hard drive is less than half full.

When it restarts there are no blue screens and no errors messages. How can I find out what's causing this?
 
Do you have an extra power supply laying around? If so, replace the power supply and see if the problem persist.

From my experience, bad power supply is the #1 cause of random system reboot. From there is goes into temp issues, video card overheating, power supply overheating,,,,, stuff like that.
 
So, it just restarts or is it shutting down?

Have you checked event viewer? It could be set to reboot when there's a hard error instead of displaying a blue screen...
 
TexasHiker, I'd love to do so but the boots are so random that I'd not know if I fixed it for a good day or so. It is a good suggestion though and I'll resort to that if I can't find anything else software related.
 
airdata said:
So, it just restarts or is it shutting down?

Have you checked event viewer? It could be set to reboot when there's a hard error instead of displaying a blue screen...
Click to expand...

It restarts, not shutting down completely. Thanks for the suggestion about the Event Viewer.
 
SanDiegoPC said:
TexasHiker, I'd love to do so but the boots are so random that I'd not know if I fixed it for a good day or so. It is a good suggestion though and I'll resort to that if I can't find anything else software related.
Click to expand...

One easy thing to check - put your hand behind the power supply, do you feel moving air?

Sometimes the fan will go out on the power supply, making the unit overheat and the system reboot.
 
Texashiker said:
One easy thing to check - put your hand behind the power supply, do you feel moving air?

Sometimes the fan will go out on the power supply, making the unit overheat and the system reboot.
Click to expand...

Thanks but no, this one's not gonna be that simple! I blew clean all the case fans and radiator that Dell uses on these XPS units as well as the power supply & the video. Everything's cool and there is a lot of air flowing.

Memtest 86 ran for hours and hours, and after a dozen passes it did show two errors. But it took many tests for it to show them.

I removed McAffee Antivirus and updated Malwarebytes to the new version. Right now I'm scanning it with AVG Free. I've seen McAffee AV muck up systems before and cause random errors so I'm hoping that was it.

What I don't want to do is wipe the drive though, reinstall everything, and then find out it's a hardware prob and that it never was software at all. Ahh, decisions decisions. It's got good quality Corsair Ram in there but I may swap it out just for grins.
 
let us know what event viewer shows...

Don't rule out the memory.... since you are showing errors. How many sticks do you have? Try running with just one stick for a day or so to see if the problem goes away.. and then switch over to the other stick, standalone, and try the same thing.

Can you monitor the CPU temps? maybe the mount between the heatsink and processor is less than optimal?

The PSU is always a good bet .....

.. and try running checkdisk if you havent already....
 
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