Random restarts?

[bigbaddog]

Help- a new customer brought me his computer, a Compaq Presario S5200NX, saying that after awhile the computer will randomly restart.

My first guess was too many processes running in the background, which there were 61, so I closed down all but 32. He says that this helped but did not solve the problem.

I set up his machine on my work bench and started the Sisoft Sandra 2005 burn in program I used to burn in new computers. It ran for three days-no problem.

I then switch to Prime95 which it has been running all day today. No problems.

I have scanned for viruses and spyware/adware-everything is clean.

I do not detect any unusual overheating.

It has not restarted with me-I can't seem to reproduce the problem.

Only difference in my house and his-he has broadband internet and I have dialup

Any thoughts would help-I have my suspects, but I can't afford to start swapping parts at random.

 

[jcortes]

see if you can get an error out of it instead of it restarting

1.Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
2.Click the Advanced tab.
3.Under Startup and Recovery, click Settings to open the Startup and Recovery dialog box.
4.Clear the Automatically restart check box, and click OK the necessary number of times.
5.Restart your computer for the settings to take effect.

 

[A-mak]

it could be his house.

Down here aus has a max load of 2400watts (10 amps 240volts) going through the powerline, if you over do that everything in your powersocket shuts off (sometimes saftey switch flicks over).

It could be the powersupply doing fluxuations from the tempurature of his house.. Ask him questions like how hot it usually is where the computer resides, does he put anything over exauhst or intake fans/over the computer in general, how old his living quaters are etc things like that.

if it were to be a computer problem, I would lean towards the crappy psu thats in the case, aswell as his house being at very high temps and/or the computer located in just a bad spot.

 

[bigbaddog]

Thanks for the help guys, keep the ideas coming. Here's an update so far:

I have been to his house-it's new, about two years old, so there is no problem with wiring or heat.

I finally got a blue screen error, but it hasn't helped much.

STOP: 0X00000019 Bad_Pool_Header

I haven't found much about this error, but I'm still looking.

Any help would be great.

 

[jcortes]

is the error code the same each time if so test the ram to make sure it is good. use memtest86+. you boot to a floppy with the program on it and i believe you press T to do a full scan and then let that run for 8-12 hours then if that returns no errors then run a check disk on the drive to make sure the drive is not faulty. try those two steps first then let us know.

 

[bigbaddog]

Been running Memtest86 for about 12 hours now - no problem

 

[Ioanni]

I had a similar problem with my computer. When I was a subscriber to Bell Sympatico High Speed DSL internet service they sent me a replacement modem (Speedstream modem from Efficient Networks 5360 Model (here is a pic

)) and I would experience a similar problem when the internet was connected (It was a manual connection with username and password) my computer would randomly reboot. Now I was using Windows 98 SE at the time and basically my computer wasn't stable. Now I dont remember what the conflict was, it was either conflicting with the OS, the Ethernet Card or some other software that was installed on my computer. So I recommend you to check those things out, if you have not yet done so.