does anyone have any troubleshooting ideas with a windows 98 SE PC that just reboots on it's own?

Question

I have a PC running windows 98 SE that keeps rebooting itself intermittantly. It will sit at the dsektop with no problems but at soon as I run certain programs it just reboots. I tried to do the usual defrag and scandisk and it defragged just fine but rebooted during scandisk twice. This lead me to believe that the hard drive was bad so I ghosted the old one and replaced it. This didn't work. I'm stuck and am not sure where else to look for clues short of throwing parts at it.

Answer 1

These kind are hard to troubleshoot. I'm kinda thinking a power supply issue. I have had a shorted mouse cause this kind of problem, as well a suspect keyboard. Another thing is an overheating problem. You could check to make sure the CPU fan is working fine. Sometimes the CPU fan or motherboard chip fan can just stop running and cause a spike in amps, causing the whole thing to reboot. Been there done that. If the video card is old, it could decide to die intermittenly and short the PCI or AGP slot - my kid brother had that problem.

Hope you find it.

Answer 2

Man, all the people who give answers and dont know crap... Absolutely amazing....

You have a software problem. With Win98 or earlier, corrupt drivers, viruses, corrupt registry, malware and various other things can cause a rebooting problem. You need to try to login in SAFE MODE and try to get control of the PC. Create a second profile and login under that to see if it is profile specific. If that doesnt help, you need to really dig deep in the registry to try to see whats goin on. I dont remember if Win98 even has an event viewer, but if it does check it for errors. If all else fails, I would simply format and reload.

GL

Answer 3

Chances are if you are running Windows 98 that the system is a fair age. So give the internals a good service.

1) CPU Fan. At least give it a good clean out removing all dust. If there is excessive slackness in the fan blades, buy a new heatsink fan.

2) CPU heat transfer. Remove the CPU heatsink and renew the heatsink grease underneath. It dries out over time and stops transferring heat efficiently.

3) RAM contacts. Remove the RAM and clean the RAM and the socket with contact cleaner or iso-propyl alcohol.

Re-assemble the computer and see how it goes!

Answer 4

If you try all of the above with no luck, you may want to look at the PSU. A failing PSU can cause random reboots just like you are turning the switch on and off.

PSU=Power Supply

Answer 5

You shouldn't have "ghosted" the new hard drive. You copied all the old problems to the new drive.

BTW, the root problem was a bad device driver.

Do a clean install on the new HDD. Install all drivers, etc. Then connect your old hard drive as a Slave (change jumper as shown on the HDD cover) to get all your personal data to the new HDD.

Answer 6

i like the assumption of zipping the document. you may replica pkzip.exe (the unique zip software, approximately 42K in length) into the folder with the document you like to head. To zip the document, use DOS to course to the folder and style "pkzip newfile.zip . except your dataset is relatively vast, that could desire to get it sufficiently small for a diskette. as quickly as you get the zipped document onto a diskette, use an unzip software, e.g. pkunzip.exe, to enhance it. If that would not artwork, uh, how's your programming skills? Write a small software to break the document into diskette sized products, then write each and each piece to a separate diskette. Then piece them jointly on the different gadget.