windows restarts frequently - Help?

[sighlentz]

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

My system boots fine, but after some time windows will restart. Sometimes it's a few minutes and sometimes it's after a hour or so. Mostly web surfing when it restarts. Then it may try to restart 2 or 3 times before a successful restart. Sometimes after restart, when I get to the desktop, it will restart again and sometimes after restarting it will run for several minutes or hours before restarting again. If I successfully boot the system to the desktop and leave it alone it will stay on all day.

I set the bios to not restart after system crash, but windows will restart anyway. System trouble shooting does not find a problem.

This issue started happening after reformatting the hard drive for a new Win 7 32bit ultimate install. It was just Win 7, IE 8 and McAfee loaded on the drive. I thought maybe there was a compatibility issue with my older system and the Win 7 install, (even though Microsoft's compatibility checker stated my system was compatible) so I reformatted and reinstalled Win XP --- SAME PROBLEM

The only new hardware is the PS (650watt) Ultra for P-4 540, 2gb, XFX-8600, system.

I'm not sure it's the PS because the system doesn't shut down, it just restarts windows and there isn't any indication that the PS has stopped working, nothing turns off in the system, windows just restarts, sometimes repeatedly and sometimes not.

Where is the Poltergeist in this system? Help!!!

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

It sounds a whole lot more like a software problem. Maybe give housecall.trendmicro.com a try. However, I would also run the HDD manuf's. utility to check the drive.

 

[bas1c]

Try turning off automatic reboots on errors. It may be blue screening and not giving you a chance to see the error code.

 

[sighlentz]

Try turning off automatic reboots on errors. It may be blue screening and not giving you a chance to see the error code.

I did that and still win. will restart. It's almost as if the power was lost , but the power is not lost,. The CPU fan runs, the lights for HDD and other drives are on.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Go to only 1 DIMM of RAM. Then try running memtest to see if there are any errors.

 

[sighlentz]

Go to only 1 DIMM of RAM. Then try running memtest to see if there are any errors.

O.K. I'll try it

 

[mpilchfamily]

Another thought just a cured to me. Have a close look at the capacitors on the motherboard. If any of them are bulging at the top or bottom or have a liquid oozing out then you have a bad motherboard. I've seen this same sort of problem in the past due to bad caps. They don't hold there charge like they should then the system restarts due to power issues. So no error code is able to show it just looses power for a split second causing the restart.

 

[sighlentz]

Problem resolved.

It seems I had a bad IDE cable from the mb to the dvd and old hd, replaced with new cable and no more issues