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Computer restarts itself

781 Views 6 Replies 4 Participants Last post by  Tumbleweed36, 
M
I have an older desktop that we upgraded recently. It was my parents and they put a bigger hard drive in it for us. Running Windows XP, 1gig ram, 250gig hard drive. It will work just great for a while, but if you do anything that really pushes it, like streaming video, or running several programs at once, it will just restart itself. I checked the fan first, it seems to be working. It worked just fine for like 3-4 months, then started having this issue. We used to have 2 ram chips in it, the 1gig and a 256 chip. We pulled the 256 thinking it may have a bad spot in it, and it seemed to work well again for like a week, then started up again. Any ideas?
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shotgn
system specs?

Can you get into bios and post temps and voltages

Also reset cmos as well
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H
If you right click on My Computer and select properties and dig around a little you'll find the option to turn off automatic restarting. That way if it's a crash causing the problem you should get a blue screen rather than the PC just restarting itself for no apparent reason.
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M
I am running an Intel P4 3.0MHz with 1gig ram. Running Windows XP Home Edition. I am not an expert user, how would I get to the BIOS? I shut off the auto restart and got the blue screen of death. Not exactly sure what to document on that. But it said IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUIL up near the top, and under technical info it said ***STOP:0x0000000A(0x0070001A, 0x000000002, 0x000000000, 0x804F76c3)
Not sure if that means anything to anyone. Any help would be much appreciated.
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H
It means nothing to me, aside from the fact it seems to indicate you have a piece of hardware which is beginning to fail or bad hardware drivers.

Hard drives tend to last a couple of months or they last for years......
It could be coincidence, but the hard drive was the last change made to hardware. What brand is it? You could go to the manufacturer's site and try downloading and running their diagnostic tool.

Here's a bit of info which probably won't help much. Sorry.

Causes, and tips for debugging, a STOP 0x0000000A

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314063

http://www.updatexp.com/stop-messages.html
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H
You'll have to look at the instructions which flash up on the monitor (when you first turn on the PC) for getting into the BIOS. You need to tap a key as the PC starts up. Try the Delete key. If not reboot and try F10. If not try one of the other F keys...... maybe F12?
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T
If you reset the CMOS and that didn't help, then you need to follow these instructions, but be sure you try the CMOS first:

http://www.techsupportforum.com/f217/blue-screen-of-death-bsod-posting-instructions-452654.html
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