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I read about the shutdown problem faced by one Madhan Sundaram in eWorld's Tip-Off column. He had said his PC restarts while doing a shutdown and the solution provided by your column was to download a patch. I face the same problem but I have Windows XP as my OS.

What is the remedy in this case? The restart doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. My observation is that after it restarts, if I log in as "Guest" and then shutdown, it works, but if I login as any other user, I face the restart problem.

H.M. Bakshi

The cause of the restart is due to some instability in the system which can be caused by a number of reasons. But first of all, why does it restart when there is system instability or any other problem? The reason is Windows XP is slightly different from Windows 9x. In XP, one can control how it responds to certain critical errors like those that cause the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) where you suddenly get a blue screen with error messages in white text, reporting some problem in hardware or some software modules.

In Windows XP, the default setting is for the computer to reboot automatically when a fatal error occurs. Thus the blue screen or BSOD does not appear. The system automatically restarts when such an error occurs.

If the fatal error occurs only when you're shutting down, the system reboots automatically. A simple way to avoid this problem is to switch off the auto reboot option, then you can at least see what error has occurred and where. To do this, please take the following steps:

Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties. Click the advanced tab under Startup and Recovery. Click Settings to open the Startup and Recovery dialog box.

Clear the Automatically restart check box, and click OK the necessary number of times. Restart your computer for the settings to take effect.

Now this will not solve the problem as such but now you will be able at least to see what has caused the problem, and get some hints, which will lead to some solution.

The general reasons for system instability are problems caused by drivers and software installed or due to incompatible settings in either the BIOS or some firmware you might have installed for some hardware.

As far as your problem is concerned, most probably it is a BIOS, firmware or APCI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) related problem. You should be able to get some hints from the BSOD screen (the blue screen which appears before the shutdown).

You will have to refer to the motherboard manual and set the correct values for the BIOS settings, like the voltage settings, APCI settings etc. You could try loading the default BIOS settings as a starting.

You can also try some known problems solved by Microsoft related to problems caused by some writing software. You can reach the site in the following url http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q311806.

If it happens that you are not able to find a concrete solution, the information on the BSOD screen which appeared before the shutdown and restart and a more detailed description of the system configuration on BIOS version will help us to help you further.

Solutions by G. Rajah

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