I don’t like posting computer problems here, but this one has me perplexed.
My laptop (P4 2.2, XP Pro) has office 97 and office 2000 installed (plus a great deal of other stuff). It has behaved reasonably well for a year or more.
in the last month or two, it has started spontaneously shutting down; at first I thought this might be due to overheating, but I eventually noticed that it actually ONLY happens when I’m running one of the Office 97 apps (usually Access).
I open Access 97 and can sometimes get away with using it for a minute or so, then it suddenly shuts down (no warnings, the power just goes completely off) - when I try to restart, it gets halfway through booting and switches off again; this cycle repeats until I unplug the power and remove the battery, then it will boot.
I know it sounds like coincidence, but believe me, I’ve done enough testing on this to convince me that it definitely is linked to running the Office 97 apps - the machine will never shut down when working on the web, or in other apps, or composing an email etc.
My best WAG at the moment is that it might be something to do with the power options or some such - it seems weird that a piece of software can cause a problem that persists through a boot.
The first thing I would do is uninstall Office 97, and see if the computer continues to spontaneously power off. If that solves the problem, you could reinstall it and see if the problem comes back…
Uninstalling Office 97 would certainly stop it happening, because I would then not be able to use office 97 and the problem only ever occurs when I’m using it.
I tried reinstalling yesterday, to no avail.
I would just sling it and use office 2000, but a lot of the Access stuff I support is for clients dependent on 97 (plus I really hate Access 2000).
I’m guessing it’s a hardware fault. Memtest86, which runs from a bootdisk, will allow you to see if you’re experiencing memory errors. A Prime95 torture test will allow you to see if you’re experiencing processor errors. If both of these come up fine, shrug, try a format and reinstall.
The 97 Access app (for whatever reason) is evidently generating a very low level violation and the chosen (by XP) option for this type of violation is “reboot the system” to prevent future instabilities.
You can enable the blue screen error mode instead of the default reboot mode, so you can actually know what is causing your problem. To do this ----
…
Start->Control Panel->System->Advanced->StartUp and Recovery->Settings->. Then under “System Failure” uncheck “Automatically restart”.
Your system may still be unstable and it might be desirable to restart once the error occurs, but at least you will know what Access is doing that was causing the system to reboot in that a blue sceen error message will now pop up (instead of a reboot). It may not solve the problem but it will let you possibly track down what is happening and that may give you some solution possibilites.
Astro: Not that this has anything to do with the OP, but THANK YOU!!! I was having a problem creating PDFs awhile back with Adobe Acrobat – the document would reach 99% completion and then my computer would suddenly reboot. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, could tell me why my computer was rebooting instead of generating an error message. I always assumed it was a quirk of Adobe Acrobat, but now I see that it was simply my computer’s way of dealing with certain types of errors.
I solved the problems I was having by increasing my RAM and installing an upgraded version of Acrobat, but I just did as you suggested and discovered that the “Automatically restart” option was indeed selected.