Spontaneous System restart??

[isildur]

I'm running xp 2526 eval and I'm having some strange problems that I need some advise with.

During quake 3 and Serious Sam (Max Payne won't even run), after about 2 minutes or so, my system will suddenly restart. The screen just goes black and the machine boots up from "cold."
Windows XP, always helpful, then informs me that my machine has just suffered a "serious error." No sh!t.
Anyone know what might be causing this.

My specs:
8k7a (fsb @ 105)
900 tbird (100fsb) w/ fop 32
256 mb crucial pc2100
leadtek gf2 pro
sblive value
maxtor 30 gig ata100 7200rpm
samsung 2.1 gig ata66
maxwell 40x cdrom
TDK 12x10x32 cdrw
temps in the 30's, sometimes 40 (120 mm intake, 3x80mm out)
300W psu (can't remember the brand)

??? help me out guys, this really blows

 

[ZZZZZZ]

The most probable cause is video drivers or resource conflicts with the video card.

 

[Viper0329]

Does XP have the Auto reboot feature that 2k has?

I had that problem in 2k until I turned it off.

 

[isildur]

I'm running the xp detonator drivers that nvidia recently released - what do you mean precisely by "resource conflict?" IRQ? I thought 2k and xp were good at preventing such an occurance - how should I check?

As far as an automatic reboot, I think I would like to find the cause of this before I turn off the feature (if this is indeed what is going on).

...

 

[Evadman]

I had the same problem.. . My 1.0 athlon woud reboot in the middle of tribes 2 or any graffix intensive game, and sometimes just " whenever it wanted to". I finaly traced it to a bad connector on the power supply. It was loose, and the heat generated by the graffix cards was enough to push it out of alignment. Try wiggling the ATX connector when the computer is running. if it reboots, problem found

I did find that it would start itself too. Same reason

 

[Shudder]

Actually isildur, you HAVE to turn off the automatic reboot feature if you want to find out the problem. If you want to solve the problem first you'll be running around in circles forever.

If it's automatically rebooting any error it gets is going to make it reboot, no questions asked, no output, just a reboot.

By turning the feature off you'll more than likely see the actual file, driver, or resource that's causing the problem.

I did this and tracked it down to one driver file in particular and although I can't do much about it, I know what's causing it at least.

 

[isildur]

shudder - gotcha, that does make sense.
It doesn't restart for each and every error though, I do get xp error messages from time to time - Serious Sam sometimes quits back to desktop, Max Payne won't run at all...
Also, this auto-reboot feature isn't one that I am familiar with, so I don't know what kinds of errors would be cause it to activate. (no 2k experience here)

When I have these crashes, I'm at a loss for how to determine what caused them though?

I will definitely check on the ps cable tonight.