win xp home rebooting system randomly

[rorpan]

Trying to get the hang of this winxp home. Every once in a while the computer will reboot and give me an error message bloody annoying wants me to send something via the net. Can I stop this annoying rebooting?
thanks

 

[Ligoc]

Stop Restarts
1. Go to system properties in control panel
2. Go to advanced tab
3. Click on settings under startup and recovery.
4. Under System Failure uncheck automatically restart.

Stop Error Reports
1. Go back to advanced tab in system properties
2. Click on error reporting
3. Select disable error reporting

 

[rorpan]

thanks will this affect the performance of xp?

 

[Ligoc]

Originally posted by: rorpan
thanks will this affect the performance of xp?

It won't degrade the performance of XP. Most people disable the automatic restarting and error reporting because it becomes a nuisance.

 

[dakels]

still doesn't really resolve whatever's causing his machine to reboot though right? Something is going seriously wrong if it wants to reboot so often. Many times it can be hardware related issue. Too high of a temperature, power/memory errors etc.

 

[Karsten]

First off... download XP Antispy

Second... random reboots can have the following cause:
- Powersupply is dying / overtaxed
- Video or CPU cooling is having issues (ie the fan died, is about to or the heatsink lost good contact)
- Your memory has issues

Now... I hope you know how to trouble shoot these, but I would start with the PSU and check if all the fans are in working order and go from there.

 

[rorpan]

I get this error C:\windows\minidump\mini070203-01dmp
C:\document~1sandy\locals~\temp\wer.tmp dir00\sysdata.xml
any idea what the problem is?
thanks

 

[rorpan]

All the parts are brand new including the case. Dam this is frustrating. Is there some kind of software I can run to answer some hardware questions or do I need to start swaping parts:disgust:
Thank for the help so far guys anandtech rocks:beer:

 

[dakels]

Hey rorpan, I can't tell you what your problem is exactly but there are some steps you can take to deduce some problems.

You may want to first run a few benchmarking apps to see how well they run and if you crash or have problems.
Sisoft Sandra is the most prominant benchmarking tool for overall components. It also has a great burnin feature that will stress your computer out for as long as you tell it to. The burn in will report any errors or stop upon something critical. It is also free (Pro version is $)
Sandra test everythig but its not as thorough as some specific apps for specific tasks.

memtest86 is a great memory tester which will also loop to check for errors.

you probably know of 3Dmark. The looping feature would help here but I don't know how precise the error reporting is.

motherboard monitor is also a great CPU and fan monitor[/l] I don't know if it has any serious diagnostic tools though.

There are others too to help diagnose problems. Hopefully some others will chime in and link some for you. Also make sure all your physical compnents are properly secured. Cable connections, RAM reseating, PCI/AGP card reseating. Check for firmware updates, bios updates, etc. Make sure everything is set properly. Go into your hardware profiles and make sure everything reports correctly. No IRQ/driver conflicts and such.

For now I'd run those linked utilities and do some testing. Still, random restarts indicate a hardware issue to me. I'd make double sure that all te connections look fine. You may also want to start testing different RAM modules too or relaxing the latency timings if they are very aggressive. I had a memory problem lately that looked like a ATA bus problem when trying to install a XP. It was actually cured by relaxing the memory timings from 2-2-2-6 to 2-3-3-6.

Also you said you get an error message and restart. Is it the Blue screen of Death? Whats the exact error message?


edit: fix link[/l]