Help! Computer won't shut down.

Factual Questions
1

I have a new computer, Dell Inspiron Quad-core, 4GB RAM, running XP.
Love it.
Thunderstorms coming today, so I wanted to shut it down in case the power is out longer than my UPS will power it.

Go through the menu to run Shut Down, it does, then goes into Restart.
Push the button on the front, same thing. Every attempt to shut the computer off, it does, them immediately Restarts.

I am sure I have shut this thing down before without this problem. What is causing it to Restart every time I try to do a Shutdown?

2

Hm. I keep forgetting that they make Inspiron desktops… I always associate that name with notebooks.

Anyhow… when it comes down to shutdown issues, Windows is never at fault, since it’s sure to have exited by that point. What we’re dealing with here, through process of elimination, is some sort of low-level BIOS bug, or a hardware problem.

There could be any multitude of reasons why something like this would happen, but I’ll take a gander at some guesses:

  1. Power switch is stuck to “perma-on”.
  2. Varying voltages in your house are causing the system to power on unnecessarily.

===

Oh, in the meantime, you can turn the computer off for good with the power switch at the back.

3

Push and hold the power button for 10 seconds.

4

You can always unplug the thing, wait 30 seconds, plug in and restart. See if that fixes it.

I had a desktop once where the power button was stuck in enough to cause probems. Just pushing it in a little more, let it pop back out.

Maybe also bypass your USP to see if maybe there is a hardware problem there.

5

Well, I tried a couple of different suggestions, without better results. Finally I got pissed off and uplugged the power cable from the UPS just as it had shutdown and was trying to restart again.

An hour later, I plug in the power, it starts right up fine. Tell it to shutdown, and it does it perfectly. And completely. Guess that did it.

Maybe it just gave up once it realized I was willing to just rip the power cable out of it that it decided to give up.

Thanks for all the advice.