Constantly rebooting

[Madmogsue]

Hi i wonder if you can help at all, i have a friend who seems to be suddenly having an issue with their PC. was working fine yesterday, and now when she switches it on, it loads up, gets to just before her login screen, she has a very quick flash of a blue screen then the pc reboots. and keeps going through this cycle.

any thoughts on whats causing it, and what we can do to fix it...

Much appreciated.

Thanks

Sue

[jholland1964]

We need more info about the pc. Operating system, hardware, software, how much ram, hard drive size, etc. Has she tried tapping F8 as booting begins to see if she can get into safe mode?

[Snoopy]

Try booting the computer in safe mode. If it successfully goes into safe mode it is the OS. If not I would suspect the PSU, CPU, or bad RAM.

[TurcoLoco]

More info needed on the problem to give you a more accurate analysis however, random reboots indicate a 'power' related problem and more commonly caused by a faulty or inadequate Power Supply Unit. Faulty or overheating CPU is another common culprit but...you mentioned the system booting to a Blue Screen and then rebooting at the moment and this behavior repeating in a cycle leads me to believe a software problem, a corrupt or incorrect device driver to me exact, though, as the other fellow mentioned, could be caused by a faulty CPU or RAM.

The million $ question -as usual- is: What has changed?
Wrong answer: Nothing, then there is no problemeither.
Correct answer: he added more Ram or something was installed/uninstalled or drivers for the X device was updated or the night before this happened electricity went out all of a sudden, etc.

~TL