Toshiba Laptop restarting itself

[ForkliftJeff]

My girlfriends laptop (Toshiba Intel Celeron 1.60GHz 448MB RAM running XP) restarts itself or hibernates whenever it feels like. The last few days while she's playing a game or on the internet it restarts itself. Sometimes it just restarts, sometimes it restarts from hibernation. I have AVG and Spybot running on it and I try to keep them up to date, but I don't spend much time on it myself (I prefer my deshtop cpu). Anything I should check for? Let me know, thanks.

Jeff

[ThorXP]

In order to figure out why you are getting random reboots, you need to make a settings change to your computer. Go to:

Start > right click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced tab > Setup and Recovery 'Settings'

UN check 'Automatically Restart'. Click OK.

Reboot your computer. Now when Windows detects a problem it will not automatically reboot, but rather give you a blue screen.

Blue screens are often called 'Blue Screens of Death' (or BSOD) by users, and 'Stop Messages' by Microsoft. We need to know the exact message you see when you get the blue screen. We especially are looking for a set of letters and numbers about half way down the page that take this format:

0x0000008e

This is usually followed by a set of 4 similar numbers in parenthesis. For now we just need the first set of letter and numbers (before the numbers in the parenthesis).

[ForkliftJeff]

"Automatic Restart" is unchecked already. And I have not seen any BSOD. Any other suggestions?

[Clockwork]

what do you mean by "restarts from hibernation"?

[qbawl]

I thought ThorXP's advice was pretty good. I'm surprised that didn't work. Have you looked at your Event Viewer? That may at least give a hint as to what the problem is.

[ForkliftJeff]

Whats an event viewer?

And the hibernation thing, she'll be on the web or playing a game and then the cpu will just restart like someone just hit the reset button. And other times it will go into hibernation, where it restarts, but puts her back in the game she was playing.

[Clockwork]

Good advice. More info here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427.

You can get to it by going to Control panel > Administrative tools > Event Viewer.

You will probably want to look in the system log.