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Random reboots while idle

S

schnecke

Junior Member
Hi everyone. I've been having a problem recently with my computer, and I am starting to chase my tail around.

Recently, my computer has started rebooting randomly. This never occurs while I am using the system, but when I sit down after my workday or after waking up, I'm greeted by the Windows login screen. Event 41: Kernel-Power shows up in the event viewer, with the first one occurring on March 13. There isn't another Event 41 until April 14th, and after that the frequency increases to where it has restarted at least once a day since April 28th.

Here are my specs:

Gigabyte GA-P55-UD4P
Intel Core i5 750 (stock cooler)
12GB G.Skill 1600 MHz RAM
Thermaltake Toughpower XT 750W
XFX Radeon 7850 Double Dissipation, Catalyst version 13.4 (installed April 25th, 2013)
Samsung 840 120 GB (installed March ~8th, 2013)
2 more Western Digital hard drives
Windows 7, fully updated

I'm suspicious of my recent hardware alterations, since the SSD and GPU are both pretty new. The GPU installation does coincide with the rapid increase in reboots, but they were occurring prior to its addition. Part of the reason for the rapid increase is because I originally had Windows set to sleep after 30 minutes; I disabled sleep after installing the GPU so I could download a Steam game overnight. Is there any possibility of the SSD being the root cause? I did reinstall Windows on the SSD after installing it, so the OS copy is relatively fresh.

I ran memtest86+ overnight and did not encounter any errors. Likewise, I have checked my PSU voltages with a multimeter and did not see any anomalous values. I also tried running a PSU and CPU stress test with OCCT but it halted after 90 seconds due to the CPU overheating at 86 degrees C. I'm looking into replacing the heatsink and fan, but to be honest, I have not encountered any adverse effects while gaming, much less while the system is idling. OCCT shows temperatures while web-browsing between 40 and 45 degrees Celsius.

That should cover all the investigation I've done so far! Thanks for your help.
 
Since you are working with a fresh install do you have all of the windows updates and are using the latest drivers for your hardware?

I have found some strange problems with windows and sleep mode. I recently did a fresh install myself and I have a firewire external HD and it would just "get lost" I noticed that in my sleep settings my hard drives were getting turned off after a certain amount of time even though my computer was not set to sleep ever..the HD sleep was still set. Anyway the disk would get put to sleep and never come back until I rebooted.
 
adreamer: Everything is up-to-date on Windows, and I downloaded the newest drivers from Gigabyte when installing. The Catalyst drivers are also the latest.

denis280: The firmware version is DXT07B0Q. It doesn't look like Samsung has anything more recent than that.

I actually still have Windows installed on a partition on my mechanical drive, so I'll try disconnecting the SSD tonight, booting into Windows from the HDD and see what happens tomorrow morning.
 
Well, the system behaved normally while running on the mechanical drive. I'm guessing the culprit is either the SSD, the Windows installation on the SSD, or some way in which the SSD is interacting with my other components.

I noticed Windows was still set to put the hard drive to sleep after 20 minutes, so I disabled that. I wouldn't expect that to have a dramatic effect on the SSD, but apparently some other models have experienced problems with that. Guess I'll wait and see.
 
I would try running again on the SSD with the HD sleep disabled and see if that makes any difference. Generally I find windows sleep to be problematic. If I let it do anything I have it do hybrid sleep and actually shut down and not go in "sleep" mode. I run SSD as my OS drive in all my machines and that seems to work..or I have not had any problems doing it that way anyway.
 
Updating an old(ish) thread, just in case others are similarly affected.

I tried a few things since the last post without any result: disabling HDD sleep, changing power states in BIOS, reverting to IDE mode. I finally got around to reinstalling Windows and the system was stable for a day, only to resume restarting randomly.

I'm not ready to declare a complete success, but I seem to have halted the restarts for now. I installed Samsung Magician, which informed me there was a firmware update available for the SSD. At the time that I originally posted this thread, I was fully updated on firmware, but DXT08B0Q was released about a week ago. I think it was just supposed to improve performance, but it could have remedied whatever problem I was having.

So...hopefully it 'sticks' this time.
 
It could be a coincidence, but I've got a i5 750 sitting at home that also spontaniously started having reboot issues caused by overheating.
 
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