Curse

unienaule · Feb 28, 2008, 12:19 AM // 00:19

My computer reboots itself. I bought a 750W power supply the other day, so it's not brownout issues like I thought at first. Mostly it happens when I'm switching resolutions, such as when closing/starting Team Fortress 2, Brood War, etc. I put Brood War in there because I don't think it's a processing power issue, it seems to mostly be a resolution change issue. However, if i turn the settings way up on games such as EVE or RF Online, it will reboot in 20-40 minutes, guaranteed. My graphics card is AGP Radeon HD 2600PRO 512MB, I have a 3.0 ghz processor and 1GB RAM. I have one DVD drive and one CD-RW drive, and one 80GB hard drive. I'm running Windows XP Pro. Anything else that would be helpful to know, just ask me and I'll try to find out.

Tarun · Feb 28, 2008, 12:31 AM // 00:31

You need to disable the Automatic Restart.

Right click My Computer
Properties
Advanced
Startup and Recovery
Settings
Uncheck "Automatically Restart"

Next time this occurs, write down the STOP code along with the offending file and post it here.

Hott Bill · Feb 28, 2008, 12:52 AM // 00:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tarun

You need to disable the Automatic Restart.

Right click My Computer
Properties
Advanced
Startup and Recovery
Settings
Uncheck "Automatically Restart"

Next time this occurs, write down the STOP code along with the offending file and post it here.

So what exactly is the point of Automatic restart, like if a system crashes?

Tarun · Feb 28, 2008, 01:54 AM // 01:54

The tooltip/help tip says:
Specifies whether Windows will reboot whenever the system stops unexpectedly.

I know this is very useful for server type environments so that they can quickly recover to an operational state.

I'll look further into the issue to see if it has more of a purpose than what I mentioned above.

Dono · Feb 28, 2008, 05:29 PM // 17:29

750W?? damn i cant imagine you using all of it.

Tarun · Feb 28, 2008, 09:23 PM // 21:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hott Bill

So what exactly is the point of Automatic restart, like if a system crashes?

Hott Bill,

I spoke with a Microsoft Associate about Automatically Restarting for a bit more information. I'll summarize what all he had to say.

Basically, a box crashing is usually useless to the home user. In Vista and XP, the crash dump will get uploaded to Microsoft if the user hasn't disabled Windows Error Reporting (this should never be disabled under any circumstances). We want the box to reboot - downtime for home users is bad. That's one of the reasons we do auto reboot, more of a user experience issue. Most users aren't going to know what to do with a bluescreen, and they just want to use their machines. So, we reboot automatically and disabling this would have to actually be done manually.

Pasha the Mighty · Feb 28, 2008, 10:00 PM // 22:00

mby your gpu is overheating. When I used the Nvidia control panel to set my graphics preferences for specific games like gw and moha, it crashed 5 seconds after I started the games. Only after reinstalling both games and my graphics drivers did I remember that I did that. The moment I undid the preferences it stopped crashing. Now I blamed it on overheating, even though that may not be true, but in your case it might be if your gpu can't really handle the game (I don't know anything about amd gpu's, so I don't know wether what I'm saying is ridiculous because you might have the most expensive and good one for all I know). So just look into it. Maybe play one of the games while monitoring your gpu temp. If it goes up drastically, that's the problem and you either fit a fan to blow on your gpu or install some other kind of cooling for it, or you buy a new one(if it turns out to be an old one, I'm for nvidia all the way, so I wouldn't know)

Hott Bill · Feb 28, 2008, 10:55 PM // 22:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tarun

Hott Bill,

I spoke with a Microsoft Associate about Automatically Restarting for a bit more information. I'll summarize what all he had to say.

Basically, a box crashing is usually useless to the home user. In Vista and XP, the crash dump will get uploaded to Microsoft if the user hasn't disabled Windows Error Reporting (this should never be disabled under any circumstances). We want the box to reboot - downtime for home users is bad. That's one of the reasons we do auto reboot, more of a user experience issue. Most users aren't going to know what to do with a bluescreen, and they just want to use their machines. So, we reboot automatically and disabling this would have to actually be done manually.

Ah Thanks, so do you think his computer is crashing off and on while booting?

Tarun · Feb 29, 2008, 03:50 AM // 03:50

Sounds like an issue with graphic drivers.

unienaule · Mar 04, 2008, 06:53 PM // 18:53

Well, since disabling the auto-reboot, my computer has been on since the 27th of February, non-stop. I tried playing EVE and TF2 at the same time, starting Brood War while doing other things, etc. I can't make it reboot even if I try. TF2 also quits in less than 5 seconds now, whereas before it would take over a minute before finally forcing a reboot.

unienaule · Apr 03, 2008, 12:26 AM // 00:26

Obviously, it's been a very long time (tm) since my computer has crashed, but it finally BSODed a few minutes ago. It said Driver_IRQL_not_Less_or_Equal

and the stop code was

0x000000D1 (0x00021000 0x000000FF 0x00000000 0x00000000)

Kilroy Stonekin · Apr 03, 2008, 12:45 AM // 00:45

I had similar problems, this happened to two of my computers, both have had a few power supplies fail on them after constant rebooting, which usually happened while I was on GW.

After the first computer's hard drive failed, I got a new computer, and after that one kept having random reboots, I got a new one again, except the second time, my hand was shocked pretty badly when I went to unplug my old computer.

Ironically, it turned out that the wiring in my surge protector was faulty(the inside was actually burnt at that point), and it was causing my computer to randomly reboot from power surges/overheating.

lordpwn · Apr 03, 2008, 08:25 AM // 08:25

I'd say it's a problem with the video drivers. DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is almost always caused by a driver bug or a faulty video card (technically, even then it's a driver bug; the driver shouldn't crash in any circumstances, even when the card sends incorrect data). I've seen others complain of crashes with AGP and recent Radeon cards, too.

If you see it crash a few more times and it's always the same error, it's probably nothing more than that; if it keeps crashing but with different errors, it may be something worse.