Help!!! Problem with PC booting up.

[realitybites]

Can anyone help. I have a friends pc to have a look at, and am far far from being an expert. The problem is, every time the pc boots up, it loads everything up to the windows desktop, then apparently shute itself down and reboots. Have tried this quite a few times with the same result. One thing I have noticed is the screen that shows your processor and memory isn’t behaving as it should. The memory counter used to scroll through the amount of memory it has, I think testing it, then it would proceed to load the drivers. The memory counter however is now static, showing the 256mb memory and not budging. I am guessing the memory is faulty and there is not enough memory to start windows causing the pc to reboot every time. Any pointers from you experts out there would be very welcome. I am stuck in as much as I have no compatible memory to replace it with to test. Any idea’s greatly welcome/appreciated..

 

[rhinoman]

Get yourself memtest which can be burnt from an iso and run before windows boots, (its a bootable cd). You should be able to find it for download quitre easily.

Failing that, take out one of the sticks of ram at a time, windows xp will boot with 128mb but will just run REALLY slow, but it shouldn't keep rebooting.

 

[Mr THX]

Other thing to check is whether the board has got some kind of safety shutdown circuits. If so is it a heat issue ?? if the machine has been in transit to yourself and had a bump the CPU cooler could have moved and become unseated a little.
Going back to your memory problem check that everything is seated correctly as well, RAM, PCI cards, Graphics card, CPU etc...etc

If you try out what JohnS suggested and it doesnt work try a stick of RAM from your machine (if it compatable)

 

[Messiah]

Or the memory count not counting could be a red herring as maybe it has just been disabled in BIOS. All BIOSes have a function for quick boot or similar which does not do the memory test, rather just assumes memory is OK and states how much there is (like you are saying).

Hope you get it fixed soon. Nothing worse than a mis-behaving PC (well, almost)

 

[realitybites]

Thanx all, really valuable input there, give me something to be going on with.

 

[VintageMark]

Hi...

I'm sure it's not... but have you considered viruses? I forget the name but there was at least one if not more in the last few months that do exactly what you describe...

Mark.

 

[KraGorn]

Originally posted by realitybites
One thing I have noticed is the screen that shows your processor and memory isn’t behaving as it should. The memory counter used to scroll through the amount of memory it has, I think testing it, then it would proceed to load the drivers. The memory counter however is now static, showing the 256mb memory and not budging.

I have seen BIOSes which only do a memory scan on cold boots, ie. power on or a hardware reset, on warm boots they skip that bit and use the memory they saw before.

So per se that's not an indication of a problem unless you know for sure your BIOS scans memory on warm boots as well as cold.