Restarts into BIOS?

[sykophreak]

I know the info I have for you is a little vague, but here goes:
The customer has complained several times about his Windows 98SE machine Bluescreening while online. Before he can read the error or hit a key, the computer opens the AMIBIOS CMOS Setup screen. He swears that he didn't hit DEL or anything else to cause it. We've wiped his HD and reinstalled Windows. Before we did that he kept getting shell32 errors. I'm afraid I don't have the info on everything we did this last time, or what his system components are, because my boss did the work and didn't charge the guy anything. I know, it doesn't make sense. But anyway, the guy is complaining about it again. The only thing I can think of is a bad motherboard.

Any other suggestions?

[valyard]

its most likely a bad motherboard

if possible try another hard drive also

these problems are a royal bane ill tell you, the only way to knock it out is to remove each device from the pc and restore each one tryng to isolate it

good luck

[http://forums.windrivers.com/cgi-bin/forum1/noncgi]

Are you sure it's not some software the customer is loading after it leaves the shop that is causing the problem?

Swapping the MoBo would certainly be a good troubleshooting step, but those blue screens while on the web can be caused by lots of different software things.

If you can duplicate the exact steps that cause the problem, you can wipe the drive again and reload Windows. Then step through and see if the problems shows up. If it doesn't, start loading the customers software and see when it happens.

Please post the final solution, I'm sure many of us would like to know. Good Luck!

[sykophreak]

The customer says the only software he loaded after it left our shop was Realplayer. He says it BSODed on him while scrolling down a page at CDNow.com. After doing the fresh install of Windows at our shop, we couldn't find anymore problems. If I remember correctly, I ran memory tests on it with no errors, so I think that rules out the RAM.

[geeksRus]

some ASUS motherboards will reboot to the BIOS setup when the machine is shut down improperly. it is possible that the machine is rebooting after the bluescreen.