Computer Randomly Reboots Itself

[blynk]

Hey,
Basically the subject explains it all. I'll just be online surfing the web, playing a computer game, listening to music, chatting with friends, or doing any other random computer-related task and then I'll hear a click and my computer will restart. I haven't noticed any correlation between activities or in the length of time before it restarts either. I also haven't made any recent hardware or software installations that might cause my computer to mess up. It doesn't go through the process of shutting down through windows so I'm thinking that it may be a hardware issue, but I'm not certain. I'm just wondering if anyone knows what would be causing this to happen or have any suggestions for me that would help me fix this problem. I'm not sure what all information about my computer would be needed so I'll just leave the basic stuff. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Motherboard = Giga-Byte GA-7VAXP
Video Card = GeForce4 Ti 4400
Hard Drive = Western Digital 120gb HDD
Hard Drive = Western Digital 15gb HDD
Processor = AMD Athlon XP 2000+
CD Drive = Iomega Zip CD 650i
Ram = Generic 512mb pc2100
OS = Windows XP Professional (SP1)

[seanmichael]

Sure sounds like a heat problem to me. Might want to try extra fans.

Hope this helps.

[seanmichael]

Sure sounds like a heat problem to me. Might want to try extra fans.

Hope this helps.

[sechs]

Could be your power supply, as well.

Check the system logs to see if there is anything software-related occuring before the restart.

[johnnyis42]

make sure under computer properties the advanced tab startup and recovery options, that the option under "system failure" for "autiomatically restart" is UNCHECKED.

the click might be the power supply, but also could be a hard drive. only a few things in your system are capeable of making an audible clicking sound. if there is a BSOD before this happens, make a note of it. if the one setting is unchecked you will be able to see what it is, and it should point you in the right direction.

[blynk]

I took johnny's advice and turned off the automatically restart feature and when it occured this time I got a BSOD that said:

"DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

***stop: 0x000000D1 (0x00000041, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xF7A6024F)

*** portcls.sys - Address F7A6024F base at F7A5F000, DateStamp 3b7de1af

Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete."



I don't really know what any of that means and I also don't know how to check my system log, or what I would look for in it. But I hope one of you out there could use this to help me fix my problem. Thanks again.

[blynk]

blah, double-post

[johnnyis42]

this is a textbook memory error due to a bad driver or driver conflict, or overclocking instability.

sooo, if you're overclocking, dump back a couple mhz till you find stability. otherwise, try updating drivers, starting with video, then motherboard chipset, then sound. if that still doesn't help start considering your usb devices and any other peripherals that require device driver installation.

good luck!

[blynk]

Is there any way that I could find out which driver is causing this error to occur? I know that it should be my video card driver since it's the only thing that I've updated anytime recently but I've tried going back to old drivers and just haven't had any luck. I've also updated my sound, motherboard, and usb drivers and none of them seemed to help. I'm also not overclocking anything either, so there's no way that could be causing the problem. Thanks for all the help so far.

[johnnyis42]

good question....

where i'd start is the memory addresses. do a search on stop 0x000000d1 errors in the microsoft knowledge base, and that should give you a link to a fairly detailed article in technet about how to interperate the 4 memory addresses the stop error references.

most likely that very last address is what references the faulty location. check out that memory address, then go into device manager and choose to view by resource from the top meny. then, if you have the hang of hexidecimal, you should be able to root through the resource tree there and figure out the memory range occupied by that address, and which devices are associated with it.

here's the kicker.... sometimes it is associated with a device, and sometimes it is associated with something generic like the PCI bus or system memory. in the generic cases, your guess is as good as mine as all the error is telling you is that that particular address had a value in it that it wasn't supposed to have, most likely a "divide by zero" error or some other logic error that wasn't logically possible to compute.

last bit of bad news... usually you don't have to do this because the stop error (BSOD) message will figure that out for you and give you the exact file that referenced that address when the error occured (usually a file that is part of the faulting device driver). in your case the file is portcls.sys. if memory serves, this is a system file for a sound driver that is part of windows media. i'm really not certain if codecs can overwrite this file, or if sound drivers can change it either, but i do know i had this problem with my phillips acoustic edge card. i eventually just got an m-audio revolution card because phillips hadn't issued new drivers in over 2 years and i was tired of having the error when i overclocked my machine.

look in the list of drivers for your sound device, you should see portcls.sys listed under driver details in device manager.

all i can say is to update as many drivers as possible, see if it fixes the problem. as far as i know portcls.sys is a driver windows uses for audio devices by default, whether you install the drivers yourself or windows has native support for the device. it must be necessary for somethign, but i couldn't find anything really definative about what it's for.