Could be anything...

...well not anything, but here goes.

At first, I just thought my system had started doing un-commanded stand-by's. I'd come back to the computer after an hour or so and it'd have the little yellow light on instead of the green one. (Like when systems go on standby.) Only thing was, is I couldn't get it out of standby. I'd have to physically un-plug the power cord from the system and re-plug it back in.

So, I went in my power settings and told it never, ever do that again. (It wasn't set to...anyway, but I specifically chose "DO NOT enter..") Well, things were pretty happy for a few days.

Today, I'm doing some directory restructuring ON THE MACHINE and it did it again. It just *POOF!, went to "stand-by". It was like the power went out in the house.

Now, I'm not a novice user, so...please get as technical as you want. I just have no idea where to start. It could be power supply, motherboard, OS settings....just about anything. But to help narrow it down...it's a Gateway 700 series with 1.8 P4, 512 RAMBUS, GeForce 3 64MB, Soundblaster something or the other... Pretty standard system.

Any help would be appreciated. I'm sure I'll end up dumping the OS and fresh installing from fdisk/format. That way, if it happens again I can at LEAST narrow it down to hardware. (Oh yeah, XP SP1 IS installed.) Thanks in advance!

I had a similar problem when I put XP on my laptop. The standard windows power management settings were poo, and also my battery was dying in like 15 minutes.

I downloaded the power-management software for my model (from Toshiba, in this case) and it fixed it. Have you done the same for your Gateway? (assuming you can find anything on their worthless f%$%*#@ site).

No, haven't done that yet. I searched Gateway and couldn't find anything that applied to my machine. Of course I was able to find lots of stuff to support windows 95 on motherboards that are 4 years old...

Of course, I noticed a file that made me think. This didn't start happening until I had just put in a new Maxtor 80 gig hard drive. The system has been stable for quite some time. (It's been stable for 6 months as a matter of fact...all the more reason to dump and reinstall! :p ) But...it's been happening since that hard-drive install. So now, I've got the origional 20gig and my new 80... could this be a problem? (The system had the orginial 20gig and an old 10 gig before...)

I hate to bump this thread after so long...but knowledge is always a good thing. In case anyone runs into something similar, I figured out what the problem was.

NVidia drivers version 40.72 was causing issues. There's no way I can be 100%, but after I dumped my machine, I loading things back into it pretty slow trying to troubleshoot. Everything was going fine until after I loaded the drivers (I had backed up so I didn't have to download again...) for NVidia. Directly after that, I started getting the same *hangs* on system restart and other goofy power stuff.

I have since upgraded to NVidia 41.09 drivers and have not had a problem. Hope this helps someone...

Nasty problems like that are always hard to find... glad you had the patience to find out why and let us know.