I feel weird posting this now, after offering others advice on a comp problem… but now MY comp is acting up!! :mad:
I usually leave the comp on all the time (as I’m running Seti@home), and noticed this AM that the comp was shutting down and re-booting itself over and over! I’m running Win98 SE, and lately it has been behaving itself fairly well… until this AM!
It did this again just a minute ago while I was checking my e-mail, and may do it again before I finish this post…
I checked all the cables, and everything is plugged in properly a securely (or seems to be, anyways). Only thing I did recently was last night I tried to play a video clip a friend sent me with Windows Media Player (version 6.4.07.1112)… in order to play the clip, media player needed me to DL a plug-in, and I clicked “OK” and played the video with no probs…
Anyone had any problems with Media Player causing spontaneous re-booting? Or any other input as to what could cause this?
Spontaneous re-booting is pretty serious. While I have seen software glitches that can do this they typically require a fairly serious driver conflict to actually cause the machine to re-boot. Hardware level failures and IO conflict (or incipient failure) is more often the cause of this problem.
1: I would check CPU and case fans to make sure they are not sticking and allowing hardware to overheat.
2: I would re-seat memory DIMMS
3: Re seat CPU -
4: Re-seat power connectors to MB
In my experience system over heating and/or failing memory DIMMS are the cause of this problem as least 60+% of the time.
For no good reason, it reminds me of the time that I did something completely inconsequential (I think it was swapping cdrom drives), and having the computer not power on at all after that.
I thought I’d killed the motherboard with static discharge or something. But it turns out that a power connector that I wasn’t using had fallen across two jumper pins and shorted them to Ground. After moving it, things worked great again.
Moral of the story: try the etch-a-sketch method. pick it up and shake it and see if that helps.
I haven’t yet followed astro’s advice… thought I’d try with the Media player issue first just to see what happened… I DL’d Media player 7, and installed it. Comp has been on for approx. 4 hours continuously, and has yet to re-boot on its own.
I’m almost tentatively ready to say that the issue has been solved by this… I’ll post here again if it happens again.
Reformatting cured this problem for me. Of course I backed up every personal file I owned first on my laptop through a network connection, and to a stack of CD-RWs. After wiping my hard drive clean and then reinstalling Win98 SE, all my problems cleared up for me, my system even runs faster. I forgot what a fast system it actually was. After a year of use, installing new software, and hardware, it really bogs the system down. After I reinstalled Win98 all my hardware drivers reinstalled right away, before it was every few months as I bought the stuff. It’s always good to reformat every year or so. WARNING: Make sure you backup before doing anything, reformatting wipes everything off your hard drive. Good luck.
That may or may not have worked for me. I really had to reformat anyway after a years worth of abuse I put my system though. I put my system though a lot of use, too much probably. After a while things get corrupted and becomes too much work to repair by hand. The quickest thing to do at that point would probably be to reformat. It all depends what abuse we put our systems though.
Dunno if this will help, but last summer my comp started rebooting itself. Eventually it started doing it so that it wasn’t even vaguely usable, rebooting before it even finished the booting up process. A new power supply did the trick. Cost somewhere around £40 ($60), including labour. But my problem was clearly electrical; you could hear the sparking noises that would happen as it reset itself. Btw luckily nothing was damaged.
I woke up one morning this past week and my computer was rebooting over & over again. I got it up in Safe Mode and ran System File Checker (for want of a better idea) and every executable in the Windows directory was 10 kb larger than expected. Turned out my dad had opened an email attachment and we were infected with the W95.MTX virus or something like that. I installed McAfee and got it under control.
I don’t suppose this is the problem here, though?
On an aside, some Internet related functions are very slow now. The dial-up connection dialog takes 7 seconds to “intialize,” Outlook takes about 5 seconds to draw the Send and Receive dialog. I hate to reformat, I just put a new hard drive last month. Any ideas?
(sorry for the hijack)
padabe, hijack away! I have no clues about your system problems, though
As to the OP,I left my comp on all night, and it seems to have stopped re-booting, so I’m pretty sure it was some conflict issue with the Media player plug-in…
