Random WindowsXP Reboots!

[Synomenon]

Just assembled my sister a new PC and once in awhile it will just randomly reboot. I'm not sure what is causing this. I know it's not the CPU overheating as I've checked the BIOS right after one of these random reboots and the temps are fine. I've run memtest86+ for the past 14 hours and it hasn't detected any errors.

I've checked the minidump folder in C:\Windows\Minidump and there are files with the extension *.dmp. I opened a couple with notepad, but it's just a bunch of strange symbols, letters and numbers.

Last time it did a random restart, as soon as Windows started back up, I went to the Even Viewer. I didn't see any errors under the first column "Type". I did see an Information entry with the source "Save Dump". I double clicked on that and it said this:

Event Type: Information
Event Source: Save Dump
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1001
Date: 2/18/2006
Time: 1:44:48 AM
User: N/A
Computer: My PC
Description:
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000000a (0xffffffef, 0x000000ff, 0x00000001, 0x804e0417). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini021806-01.dmp.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.


All the entries that appear in the Event Viewer around the time immediately after a random reboot have the same information as above.

 

[NogginBoink]

YGPM.

I'll try to look at the minidump for you. Better yet, go to the System control panel, advanced tab, and configure your machine to write a kernel dump instead of a mini dump. (Kernel dumps have a lot more information in them.) When your machine next blue screens, compress the kernel dump and email it to the email account I PM'ed you.

 

[NogginBoink]

I got the minidump files you sent. Unfortunately, minidumps are pretty useless; they offer just the barest amount of infomration about what was happening during the time of the crash.

Your machine crashed in a worker thread for NDIS.SYS. NDIS is a networking driver and the most likely cause of the problem is a flakey NIC or NIC driver. So update your network card driver first.

If problems persist, please configure your machine to generate a kernel dump and email me the memory.dmp file that will be created in %windor% when the machine crashes.