WinME random reboots

[Wheeler01]

I've had WinMe since it came out, and have had no problems up till a month ago....first it started with the computer didn't want to shutdown when told, but instead restarted. Then when I left my computer on at night while I was at work when I would get home it looked like the PC had rebooted because it was asking me to log into Windows...but it never rebooted while I was actually using it. First it started rebooting while I was playing a game or on the net, now it does it no matter what I do. I can turn the computer on, and within 2 min to 45 min it will reboot without warning.
Taking some people's advice I swapped out Power Supplie's from another computer to see if that was the problem...it worked for about 30 min then rebooted again. Then I unplugged everything and slid the motherboard tray out to make sure for some reason it wasn't touching the tray, It was OK. I also checked all the wiring, everything seemed to be ok.
The only hardware I've installed in the past month was a Network card, and I don't think the problems started right away after that.

So when I went to work tonight I plugged everything back in and booted up to the BIOS. I just let it sit there the whole time I was at work, just to see if would restart from there....It DID NOT...does that mean that it is not a hardware problem and means that its a software problem? Or does it mean nothing because its just the BIOS.

Any help greatly appreciated, think formatting would work and install Win2000 instead of WinME?

Thanks

 

[SillyMan]

most of the time when one starts rebooting like that its either ram or power supply have you added any new ram lately is so try taking out all but one stick an try it for a while if it works ok then switch with a different stick till your sure they all are ok
but if it just reboots on one stick there may be your problem

 

[Tsaico]

He's tried it all, the poor fellow. I personally did not like the conversion to Winme and just wen to back to Win98se... Either way, would be interested to see if you were to install a fresh os, and see if problem persists... Good luck man. I feel for you.

 

[jackshit]

I had the same problem.
Check your IRQs.
Asus boards let you boot and run stuff without having enough IRQ resources.
I drove myself crazy, because I thought bus mastering would take care of anything like that, so I never worried. Then I guess I enabled all the COM ports, and then there just weren't enuff free IRQs. Started having problems. As an absolute last resort (reinstalled windows me, 98, me, 98...), I looked at the system resourses, and sure enough, the sound card was trying to share the same IRQ as the vid card. Not good!

Solution: Turned off a COM port.

 

[Wheeler]

Thanks so much for the responses guys. It turned out to be the IRQ problem. I don't really know that much about IRQ's and what they do and mean...but I had installed a network card awhile back, and it appeared to be on IRQ11, same as some other stuff...so I just took it out of the computer, and everything works fine! Thanks some much!

 

[The Wildcard]

DAmm network cards, always causing problems. I installed a network card in my win98se system and while it was sharing the same irq as my AGP video card, it would constantly crash my computer.

When I switched slots and made the network card share an irq with my DVD hardware decoder, my dvd playback would skip! DAmm network cards!

 

[Hawk]

you can always try putting it into a different slot, or going into the bios and forcing it to go to another IRQ, I mean obviously you want to use that network card or you wouldn't have put it in right? Good luck.

 

[Zucchini]

it should be a hardware problem, can't really blame win me that i know of. When i use unstable hardware settings, my pc does the same thing.