A friend of mine has an older HP computer that has been having issues with frequent restarting. It is a Pavilion a220n model and its original specs are relatively unchanged EXCEPT for a RAM upgrade I gave it. This is apparently a problem thats been happening for a while, everything I have attempted to do up until now has had no effect on the computer restarting randomly.

When I got my hands on the computer, it had not had much in the way of maintenance for the life of the computer, 3+ years. Needless to say, the XP installation needed some TLC, it was very slow and bogged down with programs upon programs, and it only had 2 256 RAM sticks so that wasn't the best either. I reformatted the computer with XP Corporate SP2, and threw in a compatible 512 RAM stick to give it 768, (minus the 64 the shared on board video card takes up).

I was hoping it was just a software issue and that would solve the problem but that did not, it continued the random restarting. Looking into it more, I thought it could be a RAM issue, so I downloaded a utility to check the RAM and it found no issues. I even tried swapping out the 256 RAM sticks, thinking maybe one of them was bad, did not help.

Next thing I noticed was the computer ran really quiet, so I downloaded a Fan and Temp managing program and for whatever reason the default speeds on the fans are only at 44% capacity. I showed her how to crank these up to max when she starts up the computer, thinking the issue could be an overheating thing. This has apparently not had any effect either.

Up until this point, I've not actually had the computer at my place, only tried to FIX it at hers. I'm hoping soon she'll let me have it for a few days so i can take a look at the windows dump log files and see if there is any incite there. I think I've ruled out a software issue, seeing as how I've done a total reformat of the harddrive and reinstallation of Windows, so I'm left with some kind of hardware issue.

Can anyone think of something else I can look into when I get my hands on the computer again?I managed to get a hold of the computer, and this is the last entry put into the event viewer before a crash. Not sure if its very useful at all, but here it is:

Windows saved user KRISTY\hp registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.Found this also in the Event viewer in the system section, seemingly right around the time it crashed.

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000000a (0x00000004, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0x804e6617). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini042907-01.dmp.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.If you start taking the time to go through XP "dump logs" I think you've got enough time to reformat & reinstall which will definitely solve the problem if it's software related. Sounds like her User Profile has been corrupted. Delete it and re-create it and see if this helps...Reformatting again certainly is an option but it didn't seem to effect it much the last time I did it so I'm not sure if it will help again.

I'll try the user profile route next time.

Would a faulty power supply cause random restarts? I could try swapping that out but its kinda a pain in the *censored* to get to her powersupply in her case.oh yes plz make sure your psu is not bad and that is has enough power to run verythingThinking it might be a power supply issue, I disconnected anything that wasn't needed, so I took out an old modem she wasn't using and disconnected the floppy drive. The only things running off the board is 1 harddrive, 2 optical DRIVES and the 2 fans.

I told her to monitor it for a few days and try to note what time it was when it crashes so i can check the log files. She's tempted to just buy a new computer which would obviously slove her issue but it isn't necessary. Quote from: rainman2974 on April 30, 2007, 11:34:43 PM

Thinking it might be a power supply issue, I disconnected anything that wasn't needed, so I took out an old modem she wasn't using and disconnected the floppy drive. The only things running off the board is 1 harddrive, 2 optical drives and the 2 fans.

I told her to monitor it for a few days and try to note what time it was when it crashes so i can check the log files. She's tempted to just buy a new computer which would obviously slove her issue but it isn't necessary.

sometimes, Cmos battery is the problem maker.
Get a new one and try it.