Why does my computer reboot all by itself?

Question

My computer often turns itself off, and then on again, with no warning. Sometimes the keyboard freezes and the mouse disappears shortly before this happens, and sometimes they don't. When the system starts up again, it runs the scandisk and reports that a certain amount of MB have been misreported (the amount changes everytime). This only happens when my computer is at school and hooked up to the ethernet. Is this somehow related, and what can I do to fix it?

Answer

This question was answered on April 28, 1999. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

It sounds like you have a conflict somewhere in your system. Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Dbl click System Icon->click the Device tab and look for a yellow exclamation mark by your Network card. You may have an IRQ conflict. If so, then you'll need to try to change the IRQ setting to not conflict with any other cards in your computer. Also, by the way that scandisk shows misreported file sizes everytime this happens it may also potentially be a hard drive on it's last legs. My system has been accidentally shutdown incorrectly many times and upon running scandisk maybe 1 out of 50 times does it ever show any problems.

Author

Posted by Frederick of South Mountain Community College on April 28, 1999