Blue Screen Blues

[Soylent Brice]

at a loss here.

rebuilt my computer back in may. out of nowhere i started getting the blue screen. it likes to restart itself, and/or just shuts down.

i am using Windows XP 64 bit.

i'm not entirely sure what to do. any suggestions?

the only other bit of info is that after every incident the only way i can get it back on is to pop the cmos battery, and naturally reset the internal clock each time also. each time it goes through getting microsoft updates. i have automatic updates on, so i'm not really sure why it does that either.

:shrug:

any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

edit to add relevant info in the first sentence.

[Why Syzygy]

1. Turn off automatic updates.

You can allow it to notify you but not download and certainly not install. Worth a try.

[Soylent Brice]

4. haven't tried that, but one time it restarted itself it

turned the automatic updates off itself. it's only done that once, but it still continued to do the same thing.

??

[RoyGBiv]

2. Are you getting a Blue Screen of Death?

...or is the system just shutting itself off/restarting?

If the latter, this suggests to me a hardware problem of some sort, perhaps a failing power supply. It could also be fans not running and/or something (the CPU) overheating.

Have you opened it up and cleaned it out lately?

[Soylent Brice]

3. it is the latter

just stopping and restarting.

i clean it out every time i have to pop the cmos, so that's roughly once or twice a week. also, i have 4 120mm fans, and the power supply is new (May) so it shouldn't be that either.

it's not the BSOD.

this is really starting to piss me off.

[BlueJazz]

5. Have you tried taking out all cards, cd roms etc and using just ..

..Motherboard...Power supply..hard drive. ?

Had sorta' the same problem with Windows 7 (64 bit)
Turned out to be a bad cd rom drive.

[CK_John]

6. Turn off auto restart on error. This will let you examine event logs etc.

Right click My Computer->properties->advanced tab->startup and recovery->settings uncheck automatic restart.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

7. Look in your event log to see if a piece of hardware is acting up

Click Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Event Viewer. Usually, the Application and System logs show the most information. Look in one of those (probably the System log will have what you're looking for) for an error being thrown by some piece of hardware.

For example "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\OpticalDisk\D" (or something like that - I pulled that off the top of my head).

Usually, you can Google the exact error message and find more information about your specific problem and usually a way to fix things up.

[Lowell]

8. I had a similar problem

a while back. Couldn't find any virus or malware.
I was running xp64 with 8gb ram. Come to find out one of the ram chips had gone bad.
Run a memtest and see if you find an error. I simply pulled the bad ram out and the problem was over.