What causes the computer to restart?

komodosp

Sometimes my computer just restarts itself off either while booting or just finished booting... It's a Sapphire "Pure" Crossfire motherboard with Win XP SP3, 2 GB of RAM (which I just put in recently), Pentium (4 I think) 2.66Ghz, ATI3850 graphics card. What are the different causes of a computer spontaneously restarting?

What's really wierd is this... I am in a flat while I'm working in England which has cleaners coming in every week and it usually seems to happen after they've been there! I suspect they plug it out to plug in their hoover as they have plugged out the clock-radio in the bed-room a couple of times... Other than that I can't think what they'd be doing.

Wierd thing #2 - I discovered (not cleaner's fault!) a small thing that was rattling around in the computer - a small heat sink about 1.5cm^2 which looks like it broke off something, but I can't find on the mother board where it might have broken from!

kenon

You could try removing one of the sticks (if you have 1GB x 2) of ram to see if that stops it from restarting seen as you said you recently added the ram.

You could also boot the machine into safe mode by holding F8 while its starting up.

I'd guess you have a faulty software driver though, I had something like this and it was the graphics driver.