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My workstation reboots itself! 1

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yuggly

Technical User
Apr 6, 2001
1
US
I have a Compaq Presario workstation running Windows 2000 professional the keeps cutting out the video and rebooting. Anyone have any suggestions why, and how to correct it???
 
are you running Mcafee Antivirus? If so, I had that problem, upgrading to 4.5 took care of it.
 
I have seen a few compaqs come into the shop with reboot issues. Most reboot when switching to GUI mode. In three of the cases we just downloaded a new driver for the video. In two cases there was no support for W2K Pro on the driver side. Once we uninstall Norton 5.0 and disabled the BIOS virus protection and it worked well. They finally had to use Norton 2001. One thing in common with these systems are the older chipsets like the E530 and E630.
 
Have you recently been inside the machine? If so, you might want to check for a loose screw.

Software issues causing that problem include certain AV packages, incorrectly installed video drivers, IRQ conflicts with other devices. Is your video running all by itself or is it sharing IRQ space with another PCI device?
Not all of them like sharing.

Next thing: Is this happening at a specific, repeatable event? Are you trying to do something that requires DirectX/OpenGL support when this happens, or are you just wiggling the mouse around when POOF! you're rebooting?

Next - check your screen saver...if it's doing this when the screen saver kicks in, there's the chance that you've got a corrupted one (I saw this just the other day).

Finally - scanned for bugs, worms, and virii lately?
 
Windows 2000 will reboot spontaneously if you have a UPS system that somehow is not communicating properly with the OS. It erroneously thinks that the power is about to go off, and just shuts down. If you don't have a UPS, then this isn't it -- but I though it might be worth a check.
 
I have almost the same problem, except I will be working on win2000 and then mine will just go black and reboot. In my event viewer I get these two entries. (1) The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0. And (2) a parity error was detected on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

I hope someone can help. I was thinking perhaps I need a new power supply. The motherboard is New (DFI AK-75 w/1GHz processor).

rramirez@ec.rr.com
 
I had a WinNT4 machine do this to me some time back and it turned out the secondary cache was bad. I disabled the cache in the bios and it quit doing it, but was VERRRRY slow afterward until replaced MB.
 
I had this problem recently. I struggled for a year to find out the problem. Lightly tapping the case with my hand (pushing a floppy in, for example) would cause it to reboot.

I put in a new power supply and there has been no problems since. My research into the problem suggests that reboots are MOSTLY due to software problems. However, if you have exhaused your possibilities, put in a new/better power supply (esp if you have installed lots of power hungry devices)
 
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