Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with restart

Computer restarting

stoneegg21 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:29:55 -0800

Computer restarts when I use computer games. Just rebuilt it with a Radeon HD 4890 to add insult to injury. Ok, I just bought and installed a Radeon HD 4890 video card. All is well, except whenever I try to play any graphic heavy computer games (Sims 3) the computer just shuts off and restarts after a while.

I noticed that my device manager says that I've got a display adapter from the 4800 series, not 4890. I looked online for some solutions and found this one, which suggested I update my video drivers. I tried it, but it's not working. I restarted in safe mode and ran the video driver update program from ATI but it wouldn't recognize any of the new drivers. I simply deleted the display adapter and restarted the computer, and it replaced with the bad 4800 again.

My SO thinks it might be because I've got the 32bit XP, so he wants to upgrade it to either that or Windows 7. Is he right? What do I need to do?

Why can't this laptop sleep?

noelpratt2nd — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:15:32 -0800

Hi. I try setting this Vista Dell laptop for sleep after 1 hour. It drops off...only to come right back on -- to restart. Insomniac computer! It also got to restarting at odd hours months ago (waking me up at night) so I finally placed it on Never sleep, cuz I hated losing all I had open. Firefox is so EZ to restore all that, so now I just wanna try to let the machine sleep. But it refuses to do that OR to even hibernate when I set the buttons for that. Meanwhile, sometimes the fans just go and go with short breaks, and other times the machine is blessedly noise-free...yet I notice it's keeping warm to the touch, like maybe the fans NEED to come on but aren't? Variations of the sleep/restart Vista problem are around the Net but not quite here to happily answer this, so I present it to you. Thanks.

What is this PAD feature's name?

telstar — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:10:21 -0800

Your portable audio device restarts from power down. It picks up automagically at the same spot in the audio file as it was positioned before the power down (instead of at the beginning of the file, for example.) Question: does this feature have a name?

Is Big Brother Surfing With Me?

watercarrier — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:56:56 -0800

Very strange DSL behavior - Is it Big Brother? I've been dealing with this daily now and after extensive research - I've pretty much concluded that something or someone is surfing with me. But maybe I'm wrong and it's something else.

For about 2 weeks I've been experiencing very weird ISP behavior. Dial up problems, weird error messages, disconnects and just plain slow surfing. My machine is a clean machine - no viruses, adware - trojans or cookies. No cache older than a few hours either.

All surfing, streaming, downloading were effected during these lags. I've run Hijack This and nothing seems out of the ordinary except 2 exceptions - which are

AF891CD7E25B}: NameServer = XXXXXX
O17 - HKLM\System\CS1\Services\Tcpip\..\{470F728C-8ABE-4657-B74C-AF891CD7E25B}: NameServer = XXXXXX

(I've x'd out the addy)

The only remedy that seems to work in this situation is CMD
netsh winsock reset catalog - and restarting. Then it works perfectly.

I'm running XP Pro on a pretty new machine. No network. I've run diagnostics and there don't seem to be any problems with the network card or the modem. The cable is fine as well. I've run msconfig and taken out anything that could be a problem or culprit. I've set up new dialers. Currently I have only 2 things that I can see running at start up - one is the AV and the other is a desktop clock - both when disabled did nothing to present the above mentioned problems.

I tried firewalling and disabling firewall - same results in both instances.

I've tried accessing the web via a different machine and had same exact issue. It's not the puter - it's the line. ISP will not admit to any fault or problem only mentioning that there have been some *problems on their end and the issues should be cleared up now*.

Should be mentioned - trying to surf via proxy gets me disconnected.

Could this be some kind of filter placed on my line by the ISP that only the complete reset rids me of (albeit temporarily)? I am currently out of the country living in a war zone where there have been cases of close monitoring. So this isn't completely out of left field.

Is there anyway to find out what/who is messing up my internet connection via tracking software and is there anyway I can track someone who is tracking me?

Why'd my reliable mac crash so violently?

thecaddy — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:31:31 -0800

My 15" Powerbook from 2003, running OS X.3, just froze up and demanded that I restart my computer. Why? The screen grayed out and a message popped up telling me to restart my computer in English, German and a couple of other languages, in front of a graphic of the apple power logo.

Was it some kind of kernel crash? I've gone through my logs and don't see anything out of the ordinary.

I've never seen anything like this. Has my computer been hacked, or was it just running so long that a serious crash was bound to happen? (Disclosure: I've been using OS9 support recently.)

Will someone marry my keyboard?

skylar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:29:26 -0800

I've just bought a Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Keyboard 7000, which comes with the matching mouse (8000). It works great with my Windows XP computer, as long as the computer is on. Once I switch the computer off and attempt to restart, the Bluetooth connection is lost and the computer won't start, citing the lack of a keyboard as the reason. Only by repeatedly fiddling and resynching can I get the computer started up. Can anyone suggest how I bond these three devices in permanent holy matrimony?

Why is Firefox shutting down my PC?

jasonspaceman — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:29:06 -0800

Firefox is shutting down and restarting my PC, what gives? Suddenly, Firefox randomly shuts down my PC and I am baffled as to why it is doing this. I've tried reinstalling it, even deleting old profiles. I run adware, errorkiller, and hitman pro every few days.

My Flock browser has even started doing the same shutdown and restart while IE and Opera run without shutting down and restarting my PC. All other programs run fine.

I have 1.0 gig of RAM on an XP run PC. Could this be a memory issue? Virus or worm?

Computer restarting problem

zavulon — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:52:16 -0800

My computer seems to be restarting when there's a lot of activity going on - i.e. heavy downloading, many apps, etc. Please help! Hi,
My computer seems to be restarting when there's a lot of activity going on - i.e. heavy downloading, many apps, etc.

My first thought was overheating, but I installed Motherboard Monitor, and the CPU temperature is pretty stable at 43-44 Celsius (the CPU is Athlon XP 1700), and it doesn't go up right before restarting.

My next guess was power supply couldn't handle the load - we moved recently, and I connected some new things to this computer, such as printer. But the power supply is 480 W, so in theory it should be able to handle it. Is there a way to see if it's at fault here?

I have very little RAM on this machine (384 MB), but I don't think that could ever cause it to restart?

I'm all out of guesses here... any help would be greatly appreciated.

System specs:

MSI 6330 Motherboard
Athlon XP 1700+ CPU
384 MB of SDRAM PC 133
Windows XP SP2
WD 205AA Hard drive - 20 GB

Peripherals: CD-R, DVD-R, Printer (Samsung ML 2010), Wireless mouse/keyboard, DLink USB hub, DLink wireless network card, iphone.

Why, why, wi-fi?

sprocket87 — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:50:18 -0800

Why does my laptop's wireless network fail to work after resuming from standby, requiring a reboot? The laptop in question is a Dell Vostro 1400 laptop, integrated Dell 802.11g adapter, Windows XP SP2. The adapter works fine and can detect and connect to the networks with no issue, normally. But it freaks out sometimes.

I'll give you a typical scenario:

I open the laptop on my lunch break at work and connect to my office WiFi network (802.11g, WPA, static IP). Works fine, stays connected through lunch. Shut the lid and take the laptop home after work.

Get home, open the laptop. It resumes from standby and I set the IP to DHCP. It sees my home network (802.11g, WPA, DHCP) and tries to connect to it, but fails. I've tried repairing/disable/re-enabling manually, hard-disabling the adapter from the laptop's front switch and re-enabling, and stopping the WZC service (which refuses to restart). When I do a repair, it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to disable/enable the adapter, and stalls at "Connecting" for several minutes, before it finally bails and errors out. No matter what, it won't reconnect until I reboot.

When I reboot it works fine (though the network services seem to take a long time to start). Even if I reboot with the IP still set to my work's static IP, I can change it to DHCP and it connects fine. (Point being that it requires a reboot for the interface to even work, and doesn't appear to be related to static IP vs DHCP)

Even stranger: If I reboot, it works fine until I shut the lid and go to standby again. If I resume, there's a 50/50 chance of it working again. It might work, it might not. It might work for 30 mins and then flake out, and nothing works but a reboot. Last night, for instance, I put the laptop in standby at home, then brought it to work today. I started it from standby during lunch and changed my IP and it connected fine. It died an hour later and wouldn't come back until I rebooted. Eh!??

I think it's a "bigger" network adapter issue. I also have a bluetooth module in the laptop and it works fine all the time, but if the WiFi drops then the Bluetooth doesn't work either. That's not even the same adapter! Is there a service that's flipping out or something?

Please throw any suggestions my way. It's not specifically related to one or even two wifi networks; it happens on whatever network I'm connecting too. It seems like it has to be an adapter issue!

Note that this system was originally Vista but I replaced it with a fresh XP install. Dell does have up-to-date XP drivers though, which I'm running.

Thanks!!

Why does my MacBook sometimes restart when I close the lid for sleep time?

jroybal — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 23:10:24 -0800

Why does my MacBook occasionally restart when I close the lid to have it go to sleep? This MacBook is only a couple months old (the latest MacBook revision) running 10.4.10. It's very sporadic. I will close the machine, then, after a few seconds, I hear the Mac startup chime. Here, though, it pauses the startup routine. Then I open the lid and it finishes booting. Any thoughts?

Disco Screen of Death

Falconetti — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:30:41 -0800

My laptop is going wonky. Sometimes when I jiggle it, it cuts to a full screen series of flashing colors (I think the order is black, white, red, blue, then green). Each color in the series holds for about a second before proceeding to the next one, then the sequence repeats. I have to then hard restart it. WTF? The hard restart itself it a pain because for some reason I have to mess around and tilt the viewing screen at oblique angles while pressing power until the right angle or pressure is reached and it will respond to my pressing the power button. This problem, which is constant and not contingent on the flashing screens, may be related.

This just started a couple days ago, but seems to be increasing in frequency. Because it only happens when I am moving or bumping the laptop, I assume it is some sort of hardware issue.

I have a Dell Latitude D800 and it is over two years old (please don't tell me Dell sucks or anything because I know).

Notebook repeatedly restarts after a second or two.

Anonymous — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 19:18:17 -0800

My notebook repeatedly restarts after a second or two. Anything I can do before next week's repair, if possible, to save some cash? I've got a problem with my Compaq Presario 2199us notebook. My laptop has been overheating and so I decided to use an air can to get the dust out. I took out the screws and partly disassembled the laptop in order to blow out the dust. I put it back together, but now when I press the power button, the laptop powers on for a second or two and then shuts off; then it turns on again, shuts off and repeats. I pressed the reset button to stop the on/off cycle, but I'd like to know what I can do to remedy the problem before taking it in.

HP online support told me it was a virus problem, and when I said that the power didn't stay on nearly long enough to be a system problem, they told me it was the LCD monitor. I don't consider myself a computer expert, but I know it's not either. Did I knock something loose in there?

I have an appointment for an in-store repair a week from today (it's the soonest I can get in) but I want to know if there's anything I can do in the meantime.

PS: Are they going to wipe my hard drive when I take it in?

What helped you restart your life?

divabat — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 06:36:28 -0800

Tips, suggestions, and resources for those starting life anew but have no clue - at the moment anyway - what they're supposed to be doing. After a few defining moments and events, I feel that it is time for a restart on life. Starting anew, going on a path that's truly my own (and not just the result of prodding from family/friends/whoever). However, I'm rather nervous, as I have barely an idea of what to do and how to do it.

I realize it's a very vague and open-minded question, and there are still some that don't know what to do with their life either (check out the archives of AskMefi for such a sampling).

However, I was wondering if there were any particular resources - personal tips, websites, books, articles, etc - that really helped you along the way. Anything from a website that teaches the basics of personal finance, to some poignant advice obtained from a friend.

What helped you restart your life?

How can I transfer pictures to my computer without it crashing in the process?

punishinglemur — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 08:46:11 -0800

I'm trying to transfer pictures from my digital camera to my computer, which is being made very difficult by the constant bluescreens Windows is giving me. In the past I've had no problems copying pictures from my xD picture card to my computer by using the card reader that's in my computer. But I just tried copying over a bunch of pictures and after one was copied, Windows threw up a bluescreen error that said something like "An error has been detected in your system," followed by much more that I was unable to read because the system immediately restarted. I tried again, and after two more pictures were transferred the same thing happened. I tried one more time, and while there appeared to be no problem re-copying the three pictures that had made it over to the computer, as soon as it tried to copy another picture I got the bluescreen again. What's going on and how can I fix it?

(Side question: If I were to use tech support on this, who would I go to? The camera manufacturer? The computer manufacturer? Microsoft?)

Reading Windows' Blue Screens

odinsdream — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 11:02:45 -0800

I've managed to get Windows to blue-screen predictably, but I cannot read the screen because the computer immediately reboots. How can I get the information from the blue screen? (bonus if I can fix the problem with that information!) I'm using JEdit (v. 4.3pre2) on Windows 2000, with the FTP plugin (v. 0.7.4) for transparently editing files residing on an FTP server.

When I start the program, I'm able to edit and save any file on the FTP server approximately a dozen times. The next time I hit File>Save, Windows immediately crashes to a blue-screen and instantly reboots.

I've disabled "Automatically Reboot" in the System Failure section of the Startup and Recovery configuration, and I've verified that the registry value behind this setting is indeed set to zero, but the computer still reboots. I've installed the latest Sun Java VM, but the problem still exists.

There's nothing in the Event Log describing the crash, either, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, since there's nothing at all in the Event Log, period.