XP Gremlins

Howdy,

I have been sandbagging this forum for some time and have gained a wealth of information and help.

I have recently formatted and reinstalled XP again. For some unknown reason it reboots whenever it damn well feels like it.
For obvious reasons it rubs me the wrong way.

The O/S went in with out any problems, with this exception.

The system is:

AMD Athalon 1333 Mhz.
768 MB RAM (PC 133)
64 MB G-Force 2 (Nvidia) Graphics
1 - 60 GB Quantum (ATA 100)
1 - 20 GB Quantum
1 - 20 GB Fujitsu

If the system config would make any difference; I don't think so but stranger things have happened.

I used to be a technician before becoming disabled and still build my own systems.

I have never encountered this issue with any system I have worked with or on.

I am scratching my head on this one.

Perhaps you would have some insight, perhaps not.
I don't want to redo the system again but if I have to well shit happens.

Thank you for your time.

Regards
Troll :cool:
 
hello Troll & welcome to the forum.
There can be several reasons why your system would reboot itself. I'll try to name a few here, & if any of these solutions don't work, post again.
Could be Nvidia drivers you're using. So far stable are 21.8x & sometimes 23.12. Most others have an infinate loop bug.
Another reason could be if you have hibernation & error reporting turned on (also other power mode settings). Best thing to do is have all those power settings set to "Never", especially "turn off hard disks" & "system standby". Also the ACPI (advanced configuration and power interface) found in your device manager (under computer icon) can be the root of your trouble. On some systems it works find if the properties shows standard computer, but othertimes peopel prefer to shut it off (this is cause it shares IRQs with some things that could cause system boot problems *eg. NIC card). However disabling/turning off ACPI means you have to re-install all your PCI cards again *so if you venture here be cautious*.
To turn off your error reporting you can access it by going to System Properties> Advanced>Error Reporting (the rest you can figure out). Also some reports of some other programs like Winamp 3 beta have been the cause of system reboots.
Oh yes, & don't install via 4in1 drivers, let XP install its own.
Anyhow, this is just brief, though the most common reasons I have found so far that cause these system reboots. If these don't help the situation, post back again with some more info on your setup (software & dual boot OS system & other things that you think can help).
 
I had a similar problem a few months ago and thought my mb was the culprit. It finally turned out to be my IBM GXP75 hard drive that was bad. I had to use IBM's DFT to find that out as my crashes were sporadic and did not indicate the hd as the suspect. After I changed the hard drive everything is running quite smoothly.

DFT is Disk Fitness Test and can be found here:
h**p://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm

It can usually work on non-IBM hard drives.

---
Gilbert
 
I thank you all for your input here and I will try some of the suggestions.

1) No I do not use Zone Alarm of any type. Norton P.F.

2) I have no qualms of ripping the guts out of this thing and if beating it with a bat would help (Not Suggested) I would do it.
I am a firm believer that if I want the system to power down, well that is what the On\Off switch is for and NEVER let Windoze have too much control.

3) Thank you for the addy for the drive diag. I shall use it and see the results. It is a Quantum 60 GB ATA 100, and I am very suspicious of it for some odd sounds it made prior to the really wierd stuff it has been doing.

Regards
Troll :cool:
 
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