comp wont stop restarting...

[drnkenmonkey]

This may be quite a ramble but bare with me for just a sec. My computer wont stop restarting. I've read plenty of forums and they've all said to either change the power supply or get a new hardrive. I have a 2.6 p4 hyperthread, 160 gb hdd, 350 watts ps, radeon 9800 pro, creative audigy platinum, sony cdrw/dvd-rom. well, so far what i have done is buying a hyper 6 heatsink to cool down my comp... but still kept restarting... then i upgraded recently to an athlon 64, and bought a 500 watt ps. However, now the problem is even worse. My xp will start up until the boot screen and then suddenly it will just restart... So far i havent been able to even access my files... wut should i do? I just reformatted a few weeks ago... this problem has happened to me before so... its so frustrating!... can anyone help me?

[wayout44]

Re: comp wont stop restarting...

Did you do a fresh install when you upgraded to the A64?

[drnkenmonkey]

Re: comp wont stop restarting...

nope... but ill go try it... thx for your help

[PrairieDawg]

Re: comp wont stop restarting...

Reinstalling windows should be done after major component changes. Especially if you are encountering problems after the change. There are viruses that can cause the system to restart ... maybe you caught a bug?

[Darthtanion]

Re: comp wont stop restarting...

Just heard about this today and since you have an Athlon 64 system, it may apply to you...

According to a the resulting behavior on afflicted systems goes a bit beyond what Microsoft says will happen if a DEP violation is detected and, worse, the only guaranteed fix in this case is to uninstall SP2. Normally, according to Microsoft, DEP offending applications will crash and the user will receive an error message explaining why. But in this case, the computer just continually restarts itself. Also, in most situations, users and systems administrators can set DEP to be bypassed for legitimate applications and drivers with known compatibility problems. But in this case, the Microsoft KB entry says doing so "may" solve the problem and that "To work around this issue, remove Windows XP SP2 from your computer."

It seems one of the big problems was with a driver file used in mpeg PCI add-on cards, but other incompatible driver issues could be just as guilty. Hope you find it helpful. Here is the link to the entire blurb from ZD Net:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/index.php?p=406

[neomyaclyk]

Re: comp wont stop restarting...

I know making your ram run at tighter timings then it is suppose to will also create random restarts. :D besides that.. something could just be faulty.