Computer restarting

[Stephen Coates]

The Windows XP which is installed on my PC (which in a few months will be a whole year old), sometimes doesn't like loading executable files and immediately restarts.

Programmes such as emulators seems to cause this. For example, an old version of BasiliskII and some Nintendo emulators.

The option to 'automatically restart on error' was checked, but I unchecked that and it still happens.

Here is an example from the event viewer:



Any ideas? I'm a bit baffled.

Thanks
Steve

[J T]

You aren't seeing the blue-screen at all?

Does windows restart normally or does it give you a prompt?

[Harrison]

Sounds like it could be faulty ram. If you have more than one stick of ram installed, try removing it all and putting on stick of ram into a currently unused slot and booting up, then running the applications that cause the reboots. Also try running memtest to test and stress the ram to see if it can find any errors.

[J T]

When I had bad RAM it would bluescreen and give error messages along the lines of

IRQ not less or equal (most common)
something about pagefile.sys
pfn list corrupt

[Harrison]

Those errors can also be caused by having the wrong ram settings in the BIOS. A system I used to have that used an Asus motherboard and Athlon 64 CPU had that issue, and when i looked in the bios settings it had somehow reset itself and lost the settings, so the ram speed and timings were completely wrong. Correcting them completely fixed the issue.

[Stephen Coates]

I am not getting any bluescreen. It just restarts immediatly.

I will take the RAM out and have a fiddle with it.

I haven't used the Windows very often. I normally used Linux which seems to run fine and hasn't reported any problems.

BTW, can someone deal with the spam?