Computer reboots every hour at the same time

Most times technicians fix a problem but do not really know the cause. A customers computer was shutting down. The first thing to ask is if it reboots itself or does it just shutdown completely. In this case the computer (A Vista machine) restarts. If a computer shuts down completely then it is a hardware issue. If a computer restarts then it is probably a blue screen (BSOD) that flashes by too quickly to see.

To investigate the blue screen the first thing we do is look at the system event log. The log most times captures the stop code of the failure. A good reference for all stop codes is http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm. Also we go into the system settings to stop the automatic restart. This lets the bluescreen remain on the monitor long enough to get some details and hopefully point to a file that is causing the problem.

In this case there was unfortunately no event log item for the failure just a note saying that the last shutdown was unexpected. What was interesting though was that the failures occured hourly at 43 minutes after the hour. this definitely looked like a software issue. I then checked the scheduled jobs for an hourly job without luck. I then looked at the power settings (Vista doesn't have a good relationship with recovering from standby mode) but there was no hourly settings. I even rang the supplier of the software on the computer and they didn't have an hourly process.

As it looked like it was an hourly setting, I just did a system restore back to a time prior to the failures occurring and the problem has so far disappeared. My guess at the moment is a virus but unless the problem reappears I'll never know.

Lights on but computer would not boot

Ahh Saturday. This computer's lights came on but it would not boot. We can't test motherboards directly but we can test them by a process of elimination. First I remove all peripherals - Memory, data cables to the drives, graphics cards and any other cards. Then I attach a new power supply (PSU) to the two power connectors on the motherboard. 80% of the time I'll get the computer to boot. This case however the motherboard was dead and the customer decided she would rather buy a new computer.

Friday 29th January

A smash repair company owner had bought a new camera after 12 years, the problem was that the photos produced were 10 times bigger to send to insurance companies and very slow over his slow link. The problem was to find a program to shrink photos that is easy enough for a computer beginner to use.

A customer could not get internet on a Bigpond connection. He gave up after an hour talking to Telstra on the phone. When I arrived I noticed that he had installed the bigpond wall phone faceplate to the wall. He then had a line out of the face plate to a splitter filter near the phone and ADSL modem. So the phone was double filtered and the ADSL was filtered. I connected the line to the ADSL output on the faceplate which is not filtered.

Another customer had just upgraded a Vista machine to Windows 7. The problem was that he could not download anything. It found a site not found error, although web surfing worked okay. After trying the usual - netsh, uninstall/reinstall of network driver/stop antivirus programs. I finally twigged that it was a security issue to do with downloading .exe files. I turned off protected mode and the downloads went forward as usual.

A customer, who I visited the day before rang me because their (very ancient Pentium III) laptop was not booting. It was also making a clicking noise. This was a worry as it means the hard drive had or was about to die! I went to the customer and the computer managed to almost boot into windows. I then shutdown the machine and grabbed it to see if I could grab data off the hard drive before it collapsed completely. I'm also going to put the HDD into a freezer for awhile as this might give the computer a little life.

Final job is a computer that kept on throwing system stop errors 0x0000008E, 0x00000050 to name a few. I had tried a few things and the final thing I am about to try is to replace memory. If this doesn't fix the problem, then it is the motherboard and time for a new computer.