Yeah, my computer keeps spontaneously rebooting. I'll be typing something, and the screen goes blank for a few seconds, then the rebooting messages come up. I did move it yesterday...anything in specific that I could check to fix this? Could it be just a bad power supply, or what?

It's running mandrake 9.2 btw if that helps at all

well it could be a few things

is the proc oc'd, if so consider undoing it

memory leaks can cause rebooting

bad bios, requiring update

bad ps as you said

a virus or somehting along those lines(dunno with mandrake though)

corrupt files on hdd

hdd is crashing

mobo, mem or cpu is going out

probably psu, possibly mobo

not hdd, not cpu, not a virus, not memory, not bios

of course these are just my opinions, you can put "i think" in front of all of them if it makes you feel better

I'm not sure about with Linux, but I know before SP1 XP was notorious for spontaneously rebooting when a hw/driver conflict happened. However, I put the blame on Creative for their notoriously shitty ass drivers.

Check on your mobo to see if any capacitors are bulging or have broken open.

I think that it is definintely a gremlin, those little bastards mess with EVERYTHING. If you find a gremlin, kill him, that will solve your problem. Garunteed.

Failing that, I would suggest dropping your computer off of TJ. That will rid you of your annoying rebooting problem.

Lol, death to grimlins!!

our old computer at home is full of crap and when you use specific programs the computer will either turn the monitor off ( the only way to fix that is a hard reboot) or just reboot. how "clean" is your computer. you might have conflicting programs. just my $.02

i agree it is prolly the mobo, or psu but youd be supprised what ohter harware can cause the computer to reboot

ram leaks, processor math errors

When my computer throws a fit after moving, I make sure to reseat the cards. That usually fixes it for me, but this sounds more expensive then that. But it doesn't cost money to try, most of the other options do.

It's a 6 year old computer, so it's not like I'm all that worried about it. I have some shared on the network, and I use it for a few things, but it's not like its a super powerful machine that I baby.

It hasn't done it all day, so I'm not going to try and mess with it until it happens again. I'm just going to leave it be, and open it up next time.

My old computer used to do that. The way you fix it is you hit it for being bad. If that doesn't work you can always turn the computer off several times a day w/o shutting down, that should really piss it off.

Yeah, actually the last two times my computer has had a random rebooting problem it's been because a memory module in my RAM went bad. Just RMAed it to Crucial, and I had a replacement back in a couple days. So if it gets bad, you might try removing one stick of memory at a time to see if that helps any.

Check your system logs to see if it's software related. I doubt it is, though, if the system has been fine up until that point. It never hurts to check. Oh, and see if the filesystems had to be checked when they were brought back online. Usually if it's a system reboot, they'll have been safely unmounted. A forced or unexpected reboot will (obviously) just kill the OS without properly unmounting.

I know that there's been several cases where the hardware watchdog in some Intel chipsets had to be blacklisted in people's configuration files because of the spontaneous reboot problem. But, like I mentioned earlier, that would usually manifest itself in the first few days of use.

How's the voltage on your power supply rails? Are your heat sinks fairly dust free? There's not a hidden reboot command in your crontab, is there?