PCA Forums

My pc keeps rebooting for no reason at all... i am not doing any one certain thing each time, but it has done it 3 times in the last 2 days... once i came home to it rebooted, once it happend right as i was locking it for the night, and once just a few minutes ago while i was listening to some DI on winamp and playing with some warcraft 3 maps....what to do ?

so it seems that the rebooting is random?

is your system overclocked? if so, tone it down and see if it stops...

there's a good chance that either your powersupply couldn't cut it or is about to croak (what are you using?) or the memory you have is flakey (i just had some that did that)

Random restarts can also be caused by a PCI IRQ channel sharing problem (this is NOT the same as an IRQ conflict, there are four PCI IRQ channels labelled A - D and all your PCI and AGP devices must share them). This problem does not affect ISA cards.

This problem is very common with NICs, some PCI sound cards (the SBLive in particular is VERY prone to it) and SCSI controller cards. These cards do NOT like to share a PCI IRQ channel I explain the problem in detail here with a fix: http://soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/glfaq5.htm#5_9

Make a note of which slot each card is currently installed in right now. Pull ALL your PCI cards except the video card and boot up. Make sure the system is working okay. If the problem consistently happens when playing a game, run that game now and make sure it's okay (most games will run just fine without a sound card installed by-the-way).

If the system seems stable shut down and install ONE CARD AT A TIME. Start with the sound card as that's usually the prime culprit. Make sure that the sound card does NOT share an IRQ with any other device. If it does, or the system acts up, move the card to a different slot until it's resolved.

Repeat this process with all the PCI cards starting with the NIC card next if there is one.

Ideally you don't want any cards sharing IRQs with any other devices (not always possible though).

Do NOT go by IRQ assignments in Windows Device Manager. Win2K and WinXP on some mobos likes to put all devices on one shared IRQ and that's misleading.

What you want to do is check the IRQs that BIOS assigns. This is usually displayed briefly in a report display after POST. You may need to put a blank in the drive to force the computer to stay on that screen long enough to tap the PAUSE key to freeze it so you can read the IRQ numbers.

this is rare but has happen to me -a bad power supply did this same thing !

GAH ! sorry guys i sould have been more specific...
Powersupply is .. less than a year old, enermax 330...Ram is samsung, and is pretty new as well,

I have windows XP PRO, so changing the IRQ's wont work, singe XP automatically sets them all to the same channel, no matter what you set the bios to. I have heard of the SB Live card problems... which i do have one of those, but this isnt a frequent thing that has been happening, which makes me hope its not the PS.. Thanks guys !

Read what I posted again. It's NOTHING to do with shared IRQs. It's shared IRQ CHANNELS. There's a difference. Has nothing to do with what IRQ number it's on. IRQ channels are hard-wired in the slots and there's only 4 of them.

Put a blank floppy in the drive and press the pause key when the POST report screen comes up listing all the BIOS IRQs. Unlike XP these WILL be different. BIOS assigns the IRQs based on shared IRQ channels.

If the "Multimedia Device" (which is what BIOS calls your SBLive is) is sharing an IRQ number with another device, that means it's also sharing an IRQ channel.

The SBLive does NOT like to share IRQ channels, and this will cause random reboots and lockups with repeating sound.

If it is sharing an IRQ channel then you must move the SBLive to another slot that's not sharing with another device.