Fiancee's computer keeps spontaneously going into cold-shutdown

[MercenaryForHire]

Any ideas are welcome, since I'm not there I can't be of too much assistance.

Throw out typical causes.

- M4H

 

[Kaido]

Windows XP or Windows 2000 - right-click My Computer, click Properties, click the Advanced tab, under Startup and Recovery at the bottom click the Settings button, uncheck Automatically Restart, click OK, click OK again, and restart if it asks you to.

Might be bad ram, that was mainly the problem in my old box. I learned never to buy non-name brand ram lol

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: Kaido
Windows XP or Windows 2000 - right-click My Computer, click Properties, click the Advanced tab, under Startup and Recovery at the bottom click the Settings button, uncheck Automatically Restart, click OK, click OK again, and restart if it asks you to.

Might be bad ram, that was mainly the problem in my old box. I learned never to buy non-name brand ram lol

It's Crucial, and I had her run Memtest. No errors.

I'm having her Prime95 the crap out of it as well. Methinks it's a soft error, as this is after I had to uninstall a borked SP2 install (remotely!)

- M4H

 

[Kaido]

okay good, Crucial is good stuff. RAM is the one of the few things I actually invest in now lol.

I haven't even bothered with SP2. Everything is working fine now, why upgrade what's not broken?

also, I've found that yeah, windows xp has issues if you screw stuff up and uninstall, like SP2, despite all that rollback nonsense. just try unchecking Automatically Restart, that solves a lot of problems. if the SP2 install was really screwed up it may have diced things in the os and you may need to reinstall. the next time you're at her place, reinstall xp and then use norton ghost to make a set of restore discs so if it screws up in the future she can reinstall. just about to do the same thing for my finacee's box this weekend

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Heh. Figured it out. She's got flakey power, and the cord wasn't plugged into the protected side of the UPS.

- M4H