Spontaneous Reboot - Help!

[Josef]

Hello. I recently ditched the resource-pig Windows ME in favor of Windows 2000 Pro.

I love the OS, but occasionally I get a reboot for no apparent reason. I've scoured the net for answers, even the unhelpful Microsoft Knowledge Base, but to no avail. I have admin privaledges. Does anyone know how to solve this? Are there any logs I can check related directly to it?

My hardware stats: Athlon 750, Soyo MB, 160 Megs RAM, Philips CD-RW, Ati Rage Fury Pro, Panasync display, Cable Modem with Kne100TX Kingston Ethernet.

I've also made sure that I have the compatibility updates, service pack and current drivers, etc.

[anewton888]

I had this problem and narrowed it down to one of the following, but wasn't sure which one was actually causing it,

ZoneAlarm or Adaptec Easy CD Creator.

Adaptec works fine as long as you take it out of the autostart thing (disable the icon that appears in the taskbar)

The same for ZoneAlarm, i had to totally ditch that.

Not had any mystery reboots since.

[Josef]

Haha. I use adaptec direct cd and Zone Alarm.

Couple of questions, if you don't mind.

Are you running without a firewall? and Do you know if the Direct Cd will work without the icon?

Thanks a lot.

[cabal]

One other idea. Do you have an 300 watt power supply? I had a similar problem with a customers 700 Athlon freezing in win2k and random rebooting in win98 nutil i upgraded his 250 p/s to a 300 watt.

[anewton888]

Hi

Don't know about Direct CD as i don't use it as i think it's a pile of pants!!!

As for a firewall, i'm using a piece of software called Winproxy that acts as a proxy server, anti virus, firewall and filtering system (my sister shares the internet connection on the same line, it enables her to get my PC to auto-dial when she wants to access the net via her PC)it's a bit complicated unless you have other computers in your house/network that want to use the same net connection, but i spose it could be used on a standalone too.

I have a 300 watt power supply, and my spec isn't as good as the Athlon system mentioned in the other post.

There was also a report on Adaptec's website that earlier versions of the software was causing W2k systems to reboot for no reason, but i've had no problems with it since removing it from the startup and also ditching ZoneAlarm.

Just have a play, the likelyhood is it's one of these two, get rid of the software you don't need first, see if it keeps happening, if it does, remove the other one and put the other one back, if still happens remove them both. If it still happens then, i'm not sure what is causing it for you.

[CornMaster]

There is an option in Win2k that has the computer automatically reboot when it encounters an error. This is most likely your problem. Just uncheck it and you will see the blue screen of death instead of restarting.

To get the option you need to:
Right click "My Computer"
Go to "properties".
Then go to "Advanced"
And then "Start up and Recovery"
Then uncheck "Automatically reboot on error"

(I'm not sure these are the excat words (I'm at work on Win98) but these are close)

I can't tell you whats causing it to crash but that is how you can stop it from rebooting so you can see the error!

Hope this helps. (I also use ZoneAlarm and Adaptec Easy CD Creator. I always disable Adaptec and I had to disable ZoneAlarm under Win98SE because of crashes. Under Win2k it messed up my network and I couldn't access the other computers. Then trying to fix it I totally messed up the computer and had to reinstall .......anyway....

[Josef]

Thanks for everyone's help. I'm pretty conviced that it's Zone Alarm doing the damage, since it seems to be happening when I'm accessing the Internet. Perhaps it has something to do the the True Vector service it uses under Win2k.
It's a shame, since Zone Alarm is a pretty darn good firewall (it passed all the security tests that I put it through).
Oh well, off to look for a new firewall...

[Ya_know]

Originally posted by Pulsar:
<STRONG>Hi

As for a firewall, i'm using a piece of software called Winproxy that acts as a proxy server, anti virus, firewall and filtering system (my sister shares the internet connection on the same line, it enables her to get my PC to auto-dial when she wants to access the net via her PC)it's a bit complicated unless you have other computers in your house/network that want to use the same net connection, but i spose it could be used on a standalone too.</STRONG>

Sorry to bring this one back to life. Pulsar, and anyone else using it, tell me more about the WinProxy...Where can I get my hands on it.
Thanks...

[jdsanders]

I'm using Adaptec AND ZoneAlarm with nada problems. This machine hasn't been rebooted in...oh...a week or so.

If you only have a problem when you get online, have you addressed other things such as dialup modem compatiblity (or NIC compatibility if using cable/DSL)?

Just a thought.

[EricTC]

I had exactly the same problem under Win98 - ZoneAlarm and Adaptec were running fine, until I tried to upgrade ZoneAlarm. After that, everytime I dialled into my ISP and then fired up something that'd connect to the internet, the macine would just reboot. No errors, it'd just reboot as if I'd hit the reset switch. In the end I got fed up with it, and rebuilt it as a W2K machine with Nero and ZoneAlarm - works fine.

However, in the process of troubleshooting, I did find some weirdness which might help you - I have 3 dial-up accounts set up on my machine, and the rebooting problem only occurred with one of them (unfortunately the one I used for email) - the other two had no problems at all. I made a copy of the misbehaving dial-up connection, and that worked too. I then deleted the misbehaving connection, renamed the copy to the same name, and it worked fine - until I rebooted the machine, and it was back to square 1. At this point I gave up and got W2K <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

Hope that helps somewhat.