Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
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Thread: Computer restarting
Stephen Coates 15:50 24th October 2010
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
[Reply]
J T 06:47 25th October 2010
You aren't seeing the blue-screen at all?

Does windows restart normally or does it give you a prompt?
[Reply]
Harrison 01:06 26th October 2010
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.
[Reply]
J T 02:12 27th October 2010
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
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Harrison 02:46 27th October 2010
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.
[Reply]
Stephen Coates 10:49 27th October 2010
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?
[Reply]
Stephen Coates 14:13 30th October 2010
I have tried each stick of RAM individually in each slot and it makes no difference.

I will post a photo of the BIOS settings when my camera's batteries have recharged.
[Reply]
Bloodwych 14:56 30th October 2010
Have you tried running these executables in safe mode? To rule out driver issues?

You could also try an OS on a CD, like Ubuntu or BartPE to see if the stability issues are related to your hardware. Or image your current install using Driveimage XML (or ghost or similar) and do a quick re-install and see of the issue disappears. Then you can go back to your original install from the image. Problem is, if your hardware is playing up it might corrupt the drive image, so that would be a last resort.

If software is not the issue, things like this are usually either ram (test with memtest x86) or PSU related. Bad PSU's can cause strange problems.
[Reply]
Stephen Coates 15:11 30th October 2010
I will try it in safe mode.

I don't seem to have any stability issues in Linux.

I did run Memtest, and it didn't report any problems, but I'm not really sure what it was doing.
[Reply]
Bloodwych 16:23 30th October 2010
Sorry Stephen, you did mention Linux above but I missed it during a skip read. Bad habbit.

It's good news Linux is running ok - might be a driver issue or hardware conflict in Windows then. Or perhaps Linux isn't stressing your GPU and therefore PSU as hard and the issue isn't showing itself.

If memtest ran fine, then that means your ram is fine. It spouts out errors fairly quickly with dodgy ram.

It does sound more of a Windows issue or hardware/driver conflict. Also check out your hard drives using HDtune for any problems. Sometimes a dodgy SATA cable can cause strange issues, and can go bad just out of the blue.
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