Okay, there I am, happily playing a game, surfing the web or some such when suddenly, *bamf*, my computer shuts off and restarts. No blue screen, no nothing. Just black and restarts from the beginning.

What it's not: I just bought and installed a new hard drive and loaded Win XP on it. That's all the sofware on it at this point.

My system: 350 MHz Pentium II, 192 RAM, (what else do you need to know?)

What could be the problem?

How do I test?

How do I fix?

I had this happen to a system recently. Ended up being the power supply that was flaky. The system would work, but shut down and restart randomly. Try a different power supply. Good Luck.

What's your hardware setup Dhalia?

Sed8ed is right, this could be a power supply issue. It could also be heat related, or bad RAM, or any number of other things.

My system was doing this quite frequently after upgrading. Put in some additional cooling fans and haven't had it happen quite as often. Next step is to get a bigger Power Supply since I have been told I'm running too much hardware off of my 350 watt.

Gotta agree with the others above probably PS or a heat problem. I assume you've checked all your fans seem to be operating normally and you've cleaned the dust out. A common test for heat is to open the side of the case and blow a fan into it.

I'm not too familiar with XP, but I think there is a setting somewhere that tells the system to reboot if a problem is encountered.

Additionally, there should a log file, or you can set it to use one, that will maybe help with pinpointing the problem.

Hang tight for some more opinions. In the meantime, read the Help files to see if you can find those settings mentioned above.

Another thing you could try is turning off the Automatic Restart on System failure.

Right click on My Computer > Properties
Click on the Advance tab and click on Settings under Startup and Recovery.
Uncheck "Automatically Restart" under System Failure.

If you are still having problems, then it is probably hardware related.