B Squareman wrote:
"Carl Jenkins" wrote in message news:871Re.219994$HI.104933@edtnps84...


A friend's computer had been suddenly rebooting
after being on for a half hour or so. It would
happen to him every day. I thought his power
supply might be sagging so I took my supply and
put it in his machine and put his suspect supply
in my machine. He has been running fine every day
for about a month now but e-mailed me today that
he had another sudden reboot (the only one in
about a month). His machine had only been on for
a minute or two before this reboot occured so I
don't think heat has anything to do with it. His
old suspect supply has been running my machine
just fine. I'm going over there on the week-end
to give his machine a good cleaning, fan lubing etc.
but I can't think of what could be causing this
(very intermittent now) rebooting.
If anyone has a suggestion of something I could
try I would appreciate it.


I had this problem on a cheap Celeron PC. I reformatted the
hard drive and the problem persist. Then I swap the CPU then
it stopped. By this time the CPU was outdated so I junk the
PC.



I had a similar problem with an HP Pavilion computer here (running Win
ME). Celeron 700 Mhz. This is the machine that the kids use on the
internet, and as such is subject to daily bombardment from a myriad of
sources. It has current virus ware and firewall, spyware blockers,
etc., but still things happen. After the machine had been in use for
two years or so, I began to notice an extremely high level of hard drive
and CPU activity (nearly constant), and it would occasionally do a
reboot as the OP described, completely on it's own. For whatever reason
(no doubt Win ME was a contributing factor), this machine had things
running in the background that were no longer under user control. The
excess HD and CPU activity taxed the minimally capable power supply in
this machine to the point that it would reboot at will.

In my case, I upgraded the RAM, installed a new Phoenix BIOS, formatted
the drive, and installed Win XP Pro. Might be overkill, but the machine
works much faster and smoother now. The XP Pro also gives me the option
of setting up accounts for different users with different security
levels, which is more appropriate for the way this machine is used.
Swapping the BIOS has the added advantage of removing some of the
handicaps that HP built into the machine too.

So, the question is, does your friend also notice a lot of hard
drive/CPU activity on his machine? How long has it been in service? On
what operating system? Is it internet connected? Is it just possible
that a clean sweep of the HD might be in order? I am am only suggesting
this (from my own experience) as one possibility. It would also be one
possible explanation why the swapped power supply had the described
results. The supply he swapped into the machine may be more capable
than the original, which would explain the lower occurrance of reboots,
though the problem continues. It may well be a hardware problem too,
and this may not apply. Your mileage may vary, etc. Good luck.

Nels