Computer geeks, please help?

[sheekayt]

Could anyone tell me why my computer will -- not always, but regularly -- spontaneously reboot itself minutes after start up?

I hadn't thought too much of it when it started happening, because it was always immediate. This time, it happened after I had firefox up and running and was starting to get involved in using my computer. This is

Comments

[jarandhel]

In my experience, the most common causes of spontaneous reboots are a faulty power supply, or overheating.

[angus_mcnitt]

Have you checked to make sure all the fans are spinning and the are not clogged with dust?

Does it still do it if you don't log in? If you just start it but let it sit without logging in?

[sheekayt]

The fans seem to be running. Though sadly this is the machine that is simply too old for someone not-geek-enough like myself to have any idea how to break into (and I have opened up and tinkered with the insides of computers before). Literally, when I tried shortly after acquiring it, I almost did break something, and haven't tried again since.

It's totally inconsistent when it happens. Most often will be after login, but before it's finished start up enough for me to open anything. It may have happened before login on occasion. This morning was the first time it's happened after I've gotten started using it. Always before, if it's been okay past startup, it's been fine for as long as I had it on and running.

[angus_mcnitt]

Ok, when it shuts down, does it tell you it is shutting down, or does it just do it?

It sounds programmatic, as opposed to hardware based. Have you noticed any new slowness or new icons show up since this started?

[sheekayt]

"New" slowness is hard to define. It's been getting slower and slower on a seemingly daily basis (though not drastically slower from day to day, but definitely significantly so over time). No new icons.

I'll see the standard "windows is shutting down" as it does so. No other warning, though.

[pinkspiderchan]

That used to happen to my laptop a lot. I figured that the machine simply hated me, but after opening it up and cleaning out the fan/heatsink, it worked better than it had in a while and I never had the problem again. So yeah, in my situation the random reboots/shutdowns were due to overheating.

-Rhi~

[gryphon_m]

There is a new virus that causes that effect. Check into it.

[windtree]

Other than the power supply and overheating other people have mentioned, I'd check for faulty memory (something like memtest which is free and sits on a bootable cd (as long as you can get a machine running long enough to download and burn it) so you don't have to worry about what the OS might be doing.

As someone suggested it might be a Windows virus, you could try a bootable linux CD/DVD and see if that comes up and runs for longer than your Windows install (if it does, suspect Windows, if not, suspect hardware). If it's just for testing, I'd suggest something like Damn Small Linux because, well, it's small, so will download and boot faster (and comes with Firefox, so you can stress your machine :)).